Cancelbot

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A cancelbot is an automated or semi-automated process for sending out third-party cancel messages over Usenet, commonly as a stopgap measure to combat spam. [1]

Contents

History

One of the earliest uses of a cancelbot was by microbiology professor Richard DePew, to remove anonymous postings in science newsgroups. [2] Perhaps the most well known early cancelbot was used in June 1994 by Arnt Gulbrandsen within minutes of the first post of Canter & Siegel's second spam wave, [3] [4] as it was created in response to their "Green Card spam" in April 1994. [5] Usenet spammers have alleged that cancelbots are a tool of the mythical Usenet cabal.

Rationale

Cancelbots must follow community consensus to be able to serve a useful purpose, and historically, technical criteria have been the only acceptable criteria for determining if messages are cancelable, and only a few active cancellers ever obtain the broad community support needed to be effective.

Pseudosites are referenced in cancel headers by legitimate cancelbots to identify the criteria on which a message is being canceled, allowing administrators of Usenet sites to determine via standard "aliasing" mechanisms which criteria that they will accept third-party cancels for.

Currently, the generally accepted criteria (and associated pseudosites) are: [6]

PseudositeCriterion
Breidbart Index above the cancel threshold for the group or hierarchycyberspam!usenet
"Make money fast" schemesmmfcancel!cyberspam!usenet
"Spew" (large number of nonsense or repeated postings)spewcancel!cyberspam!usenet
Binary files posted to a group that doesn't allow thembincancel!cyberspam!usenet
Retromoderation (only applies to groups that have a retromoderation policy in place)retromod!cyberspam!usenet
Ad cancels within the biz.* hierarchyadcancel!cyberspam!usenet
Messages originating from sites or networks under active Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) sanction by the community; the UDP is exceedingly rare, requiring a broad consensus that a Usenet site is acting in a manner generally harmful to the community, and active cancellation under a UDP is even rarer stillsitenameudp!udpcancel!cyberspam!usenet

By general convention, special values are given in X-Canceled-By, Message-Id and Path headers when performing third-party cancels. This allows administrators to decide which reasons for third-party cancellation are acceptable for their site:

See also

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References

  1. Scott Southwick; J.D. Falk. "The Net Abuse FAQ". Archived from the original on November 1, 1996. Retrieved 2006-09-02.
  2. Lueg, Christopher; Fisher, Danyel (2012-12-06). From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN   9781447100577.
  3. Canter, Laurence. "Green Card Lottery- Final One?" . Retrieved 2006-09-02.
  4. Gulbrandsen, Arnt. "Now comes the C&S crunch... let's see" . Retrieved 2006-09-02.
  5. Gulbrandsen, Arnt. "Canter and Siegel: What really happened".
  6. "Cancel Messages FAQ". wiki.killfile.org. Retrieved 2018-05-09.