According to numerous tweets and a Cox support page, Cox will be discontinuing newsgroup service on June 30th.

Note from Cox.com support page:

Note: Effective June 30, 2010, Newsgroup service will no longer be offered as part of the Cox High Speed Internet service.

Customers are often confused as to the impact of their ISP dropping newsgroup access.  It doesn’t stop you from choosing your own Usenet provider.  Instead it means Cox won’t offer the service for free anymore.  They aren’t looking to block newsgroups.  They just aren’t offering them free to customers beginning June 30th.

Visit our free Usenet trials and latest newsgroup specials sections for help in choosing a new Usenet service.

yes i agree that google care, and do something about this.

The click spam feature was added recently, perhaps 6 months ago, that indicates they do care, even if it is not that effective.

also, how effective it is depends of course on how many people report spam. For groups like comp.lang.lisp, many are old timers, don't use google, and the readership is already comparatively very small. So, it can get worse.

another thing might be interesting is that the spam rate seems to depends on the newsgroup too. For example, comp.lang.lisp is now 95% spam, but however, comp.lang.python gets almost no spam at least as shown in google group. This probably has to do with number of users, and also that comp.lang.python is mirrored with python's mailing list.

technology marches on by changing needs. In the 1990s or before, newsgroup is effectively the only medium and technology of subject oriented online forum. (besides a few commercial ones, e.g. CompuServe) Thru the years since 1990s which i personally lived thru, other tech of communication came into being that became widely adopted, roughly in chronological order: mailing lists, irc, faq-o-matic (a pre-cursor to wiki), Instant messaging, blogs, wiki, social network sites, youtube, twitter, and today much of these are all intermingled and inter-connected. For example, much sites that do any type of communication often has mailing list, web feed (rss/atom), web interface, instant messaging, all together as one integrated technology, not as much as independent technologies. (e.g. facebook, much of google's many services) Voice and video chat and conferencing is today almost everywhere too.

one point i would like to note that is, if google didn't provide the newsgroup service in 2001 (or the DejaNews didn't start it), newsgroup might have gone the ways of dinosaur, much like many unix net tech such as who, talk, finger, gopher.

Xah ∑ http://xahlee.org/ ☄

Originally posted to comp.lang.lisp at: Source