" wrote:

It's so sad. I used to read this group regularly in the late '90s.
There was spam and political rants then, but nothing like now,
where it seems like nine out of ten posts are ads for stupid
watches or something. Is there anything to be done?
Robobass

You'll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy than
your own news server Google Groups. That's where the spam is coming
from. There is some other weirdness going on with Google Groups
besides the spam, but that's another subject.

Get a real news reader/server and filter posts from Google Groups. I
agree with the other poster about Xnews. It's a very good newsreader
with a significant (however short) learning curve. Filtering Google
Groups posts (without filtering the whole branch) will remove almost
all the spam if no one replies to it and you will still see replies
to regular Google Groups posters.