Google Groups is Dead

http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/

by RedWolves • 17 years ago

259 66 17 years ago

ejohn.org

mpk• 17 years ago

So is this link.

jgrahamc• 17 years ago

So is his entire web site: http://ejohn.org/

phsr• 17 years ago

I guess I got in right before it died:

As far as I'm concerned, Google Groups is dead.

For the jQuery project we've run all of our community discussions through Google Group mailing lists for the past three years. At this moment the main jQuery group is the second most popular programming group (next to Android developers) clocking in at over 21,000 members. We also have the jQuery Dev and jQuery UI groups. The main jQuery group averages around 83-143 messages per day. I also use Google Groups for discussion on a number of my other projects (Processing.js, Env.js, Sizzle.js, and TestSwarm).

This post isn't so much about the usefulness of mailing lists as a discussion medium, it's the complete failure of Google Groups as an adequate purveyor of public discussion software. For the jQuery project we're already in the process of moving the full discussion area to a forum that we control. We should have it set up, and everything moved over, within the next month or two.

There is one area in which Google Groups continues to shine: Private, or restricted, mailing list discussions. However any attempts at using it for a public discussion medium are completely futile.

The primary problem with Google Groups boils down to a systemic failure to contain and manage spam. Only a bottom-up overhaul of the Google Groups system would be able to fix the problems that every Google Group faces.

To better illustrate the problem, let's step through the common experience of running a Google Group.

The Beginning

When you create a public group everything will go well for a couple days, at most. Without fail an onslaught of spam will start to come through your group - I've even seen it happen within the first day. It happens to every group and doesn't matter how well you advertise it (or try to hide it). After having watched Google Groups for as long as I have I can only assume that there exists no spam filtering whatsoever. Or, if there is any, it's the most grossly incompetent spam filter I've ever seen.

When these spam messages start to come to your group a couple things will happen. First, you may not even notice the spams coming through. Since you're likely reading the list in a competent email client (such as Gmail) it'll detect the messages and dump them into your personal spam folder. Don't be surprised if you visit your group and see a pile of spammy messages sitting there greeting your new visitors.

Most email client spam detection software is smart. It looks for common points of failure and tries to take care of the root problem. One such tactic is to realize that a lot of spam is coming from a single address (like a Google Group) and start to flag most of it as it comes through (regardless of the actual content). The result is that much of your list is being flagged as a false positive. In the case of Gmail people will then start to un-flag the falsely-binned group messages. This works well until the system starts to think that all group messages are ok - and here comes the spam again.

To fight the spam you'll likely start flagging emails as "spam" in the groups interface. This works well (the user is permanently banned and the message deleted) - until a couple hours pass, that is. You'll see the spammer return, with a slightly different username, posting the same exact spam messages. Flagging a user/message as spam does absolutely nothing to train the groups spam detection system (for reasons that aren't entirely clear and only be explained by incompetence).

It's a horrible game of cat and mouse with the spam destroying the quality of your group. It's at this point that you say "enough is enough" and you turn on moderation for your group.

Moderation

Google Group moderation seems like a palatable idea but in practice is aggravating and crippling. To start, it creates a horrible first-participation experience for your users. For example, let's say you go to bed at the same time as someone in Tokyo attempts to post a message to the group; you won't be able to moderate the message through for many hours (and that's assuming that you moderate messages during your work day). While the experience is much worse than instant posting it is par for the course for most moderation systems.

Of course, this would assume that Google Groups actually informs the users that their message has been held in moderation. Looking through the moderation queue you can see users attempting to submit their message over-and-over again, wondering why it isn't working. Eventually they'll just give up in frustration.

In order to combat this you'll typically need to bring on a bunch of people to help with the moderation duties. In the case of the main jQuery and jQuery UI groups we divvy up the moderation based upon the time of day and week (and where the moderator lives). This is incredibly frustrating but still manageable.

This moderation load also assumes that you are able to successfully navigate the abysmal Google Groups moderation user interface. It's a horrible quagmire of radio buttons and un-evenly spaced rows with no visual delineation. I've provided an example of the interface below (BEWARE: Contains Not Safe For Work text).

When you begin moderating all the radio buttons start on the "Ignore" column, it's your duty to move all the messages to the right columns. The "Spam" and "Always Allow" columns were added just recently (thank goodness) - the moderation process use to be much worse.

With a user interface this bad mistakes happen. Sometimes spam accidentally slips through, sometimes users get completely banned. I estimate that this happens about once in every couple hundred messages. With 84-143 messages coming to the main jQuery Google Group every day that means that there'll be at least a few users banned and a few spam coming through every week.

While the occasional spam slipping through is a reality of the web, accidentally banning users is unacceptable - but it does happen, even when you don't mean to. For example, here's a message that I got from a user just today:

    I seem to have been banned from the jQuery Google Group for a reason
    I'm not aware of.
    > The owner of this group has banned you from this group.

    Not sure if this is another Groups glitch or not. I can still access
    the jQuery UI group, though.
    My account is under email: XXXXX@gmail.com

    Please advise. Thanks.

Nothing quite like insulting, confusing, and scaring your users, due to a poorly-designed user interface and abysmal spam detection. This is the reality that Google Group owners have to live with on a daily basis.

All of this changed a couple weeks ago.

End Game

The final straw was placed upon my patience with the Google Groups system a few weeks ago. Spammers are now spoofing the email addresses of existing group participants to sneak their messages through. Previously you would've seen a delightful "FREE MOVIE DOWNLOADS" spam from "freemovies123@gmail.com" - but now you'll see it coming from existing group users - or even the group moderators themselves. This cheat completely bypasses the moderation system since the spammers are pretending to be pre-moderated users.

The Google Groups system is completely fooled. The spam message comes in claiming to be from an existing group participant - and according to the Google Groups interface there is no difference. If you click the user's name you'll be taken to a full listing of that user's posts (with the spam messages delightfully interspersed).

For example, here's a user whose email address is being spoofed and an email that was actually sent to Google Groups. Note that the actual email is coming from a .ch domain and not from the actual Gmail server.

The only "cure" to this problem is to watch for a spam message to come through and then force that user into a permanent state of moderation. Of course, you then have to be careful not to bring that user into a "pre-approved" state the next time you clean up the moderation queue. There is no way to keep track of which users should be kept in a always-moderate state and which should skip moderation.

At this very moment my own email address, and the email addresses of most of the jQuery group moderators, are being spoofed by spammers. This means that we (the owner and moderators of the group) have to moderate our own messages before we post, for fear of letting a spoofed spam through. This will likely happen indefinitely since Google Groups has been notoriously slow to fix problems with the site.

On top of all of this, Google Groups actually strips out many of the original spam indicators from the message when it re-broadcasts it to the full list. This means that when the message finally arrives at a user's email client it actually looks like it came from the spoofed user. Since I'm currently being spoofed I've actually had a bunch of my legitimate email end up in spam folders as a result. Having my email address become flagged as a spammer is positively infuriating. The fact that Google Groups is silently sitting by and blindly letting this happen communicates one thing to me: Google Groups is dead, time to move on as quickly as possible.

Moving On

I've completely given up on Google Groups - and I'm not the only one. Feel free to ask any Google Group moderator and I'm certain that you'll only get a sad shake of their head. The situation is completely untenable - which is why the jQuery team is actively working to get all our lists off of Google Groups as quickly as possible.

To give you an idea of the overall level of quality that Google Groups exhibits here is an anecdote: A couple weeks ago the jQuery UI Google Group was completely deleted for no apparent reason. It was gone for the better part of a day before it was restored. The only mechanism for contacting support, even in a situation as serious as that, is to post on a public Google Group. We were never received any response from an admin regarding the missing group. Are there backups of group data? Who knows! Forget it, life is too short for the stress and aggravation that Google Groups provides.

While Google Groups provides a mechanism for exporting a CSV members list it provides no way to export the full message archive for a group. With over 120,000 messages tied up in the main jQuery Google Group alone it's going to take some significant work to get everything out and move on. Our only avenue of escape (short of screen scraping the entire Google Group archive) is doing an IMAP dump of my personal Gmail account and extracting all the jQuery group posts from it. I'm sure that experience will be absolutely delightful as well.

Bye Google Groups, you won't be missed.

xtho• 17 years ago

Isn't the problem rather that e-mail (or rather smtp) is dead (or should be). It seems to me the only solution to this problem is a web-based BBS or replace e-mail with something else. Or is there a mailling list server that requires users to authenticate before accepting a post?

brown9-2• 17 years ago

Is the 404 a meta joke?

jeresig3• 17 years ago

Sorry everyone, my server has completely fallen over. Feel free to delete this post and I can re-post when it's back.

mdemare3• 17 years ago

Please do repost, it's a good read. What are you going to switch to?

rdoherty• 17 years ago

Site is working now.

mdemare3• 17 years ago

Google has a cache:

http://74.125.77.132/search?hl=en&safe=off&rls=en-us...

scorpion032• 17 years ago

Google cache is not dead.

dangrover• 17 years ago

I used Mailman for the discussion group for beta testers of my app, and people were always confused about how it works or why they were suddenly getting emails from other people. But once I switched to Google Groups, people get it and participate a lot more.

davidw2• 17 years ago

Yeah, there is something of a distinction between a communication channel for something that's already "made it", and a project that still needs a low barrier to entry. You can impose higher hurdles for people to jump over to participate without really losing much if your project is already 'famous'.

However, if you're trying to gain traction, having something that's easy to get started with is important, and Google Groups fits that bill pretty well: 1) people with Google accounts can sign up easily. 2) You can treat it as either a web-based forum, or a mailing list, which allows people to interact in the way that's best for them.

Indeed, I just switched Hecl over to using Google Groups, from a SourceForge mailing list, and so far I'm reasonably happy, despite a few spam problems.

niels_olson• 17 years ago

> there is something of a distinction between a communication channel for something that's already "made it"

> MADE IT

This was true for us even on a small student-organized webapp project. Even some of the guys on the team protested using MailMan and went on safari looking for alternatives while we were prototyping, then when the project was officially adopted by the college and all students were told "yeah, the old channels exist, but this is a new, officially sanctioned channel also", suddenly there was a lot more activity on MailMan.

steveklabnik• 17 years ago

A group I'm invovled in did the same thing.

"This is a mailing list, not a discussion forum. Just post it to the Google Group."

I was really, really confused.

ido• 17 years ago

And by extension, so is their usenet archive.

It's really puzzling, since gmail already has a decent spam filter - can't they apply that to groups?

shimon• 17 years ago

What's a good alternative? The spam problems in Google Groups totally suck, especially for very active groups, but it's a familiar system, so even non-techies can sign up and post fairly easily.

Is Yahoo groups even worse?

nose• 17 years ago

Hopefully, the next yc batch will have one..

dragonquest• 17 years ago

I was thinking of the same thing. What is really needed is a clean group management solution with a nice inviting UI, a good spam filter (something like Akismet) and good access control for various levels of admins. The last would really hit it off with open source projects having a BDFL sorta guy with multiple pillars.

It could even be freemium with free access to public groups involved in open source projects. Maybe even some nice integration with whatever seems logical.

mdemare3• 17 years ago

I wonder if Google is neglecting Groups because they think Wave will replace it?

numbchuckskills• 17 years ago

wave is doing a good job of replacing it for me! with:public = gold

cake• 17 years ago

I don't think Wave will replace it, it's different purposes.

They have switched their own support forums from Google Groups to a much more usable classical forum : http://www.google.com/support/forum

Google Groups was such a mess, I never understood what was really going on.

nostrademons• 17 years ago

Yahoo groups is definitely worse.

I'd kinda like to see either the Groups team fix the problems or some startup come up and really own that space.

brianobush2• 17 years ago

The moderated groups that I read/contribute to are doing well. Spam isn't an issue there.

jeresig3• 17 years ago

You should chat with the moderators of those groups - I'm positive that they're having a similar experience.

For people that have already been whitelisted in (and assuming that you don't get spoofed) the experience is great. For those running the group? Not so much.

boucher• 17 years ago

Our list is obviously smaller, but with somewhere around 1000 members, I don't find the moderation duties difficult to keep up with. And we've only let spam through a couple of times.

GeneralMaximus• 17 years ago

Freelists is a nice service for FOSS projects. You might want to check it out.

Link: http://freelists.org

snewe• 17 years ago

As the article points out, Google Groups for private lists is awesome. Free and includes a gig of storage.

anigbrowl• 17 years ago

Rather than central moderation, which is appropriate in some cases but would lead to silly turf fights on others, GG ought to implement a simple voting system, not unlike YouTube comments (where particularly stupid things disappear after 6 downvotes).

Google really ought to consider the idea of putting NNTP back; it's obvious they don't really want to develop Groups as a tool (we can still hope for Wave to save the day, but...) and so GG looks more and more like the zombified corpse of Usenet. Perhaps if there was a push for Groups to have it's own Google Code API we might see some innovation.

mcav• 17 years ago

Groups does have a 1-5 star rating system; I've noticed spam often gets one-star votes in groups I frequent. But that doesn't really address the problem; they ought to have a "report spam" featuer as well.

davidw2• 17 years ago

So the spammers just start reporting a bunch of good emails as spam in order to confuse the moderation system.

yannis• 17 years ago

I would be glad to see the jQuery discussions moved to a normal forum and moderated accordingly. A good idea would be to use a HN style forum.

Google has failed to contain spam, even on discussion lists for their own offerings.

It is actually good advise to curate your own data.

Maciek4162• 17 years ago

This is a problem I see plaguing several code-related groups that I'm following, and it is very annoying (and up till now, mystifying) to see not only showing up in regular message flow, but also in abridged once-a-day summaries.

It's nice to see Google maintaining stuff like Groups and Code, but they don't seem to get very good maintenance. I've been finding myself saying the phrase "I wish they'd move this project away from google code and onto github" quite frequently lately. I suspect I'll be saying something similar for groups very soon..

mrduncan• 17 years ago

I completely agree, and actually this blog post has gotten me thinking about different solutions and how they might look.

It seems like a perfect project to use Lamson (http://www.zedshaw.com/projects/lamson/) as a starting point for.

antirez• 17 years ago

Google code is something like once a month in read-only for network maintenance, I really wonder what they do in the downtime.

antonovka• 17 years ago

I've been finding myself saying the phrase "I wish they'd move this project away from google code and onto github" quite frequently lately.

Funny, I usually find myself saying "I wish they'd move this project away from github, provide a proper API-stable versioned release, properly document the project and APIs, and otherwise behave like a well-maintained open source project" a lot lately. =)

If they did all that, then I wouldn't need to fork the project, maintain any local patches/modifications, etc.

Maciek4162• 17 years ago

Good points.

You're right that many github-hosted projects suffer from overly-brief documentation. Perhaps Github attracts a certain type of project maintainer at the moment..

tdavis• 17 years ago

Or, "Why I Use Mailman and Spam Filtering". I just talked to a list moderator about this issue yesterday, actually. It's highly annoying and some project contributors have actually posted on lists to say "Sorry, there's too much spam, I'm unsubscribing".

ankeshk• 17 years ago

Cant google just add their spam filters for all the group messages too?

brianobush2• 17 years ago

not so easy. email is sent to thousands (if not millions) of address. when someone presses spam in gmail, most likely if the mail is truly spam hundreds of others marked the same mail as spam. the email could be quickly added to their training data, the sending agent black listed, etc.

Now groups is a different thing. How many of you mark messages that are spam? A few I am sure, but the point is the offending person is long gone and the message is already been posted. Harder problem unless you can wall off the source and control the users access.

giardini• 17 years ago

Google should split USENET from Google Groups. The first is useful, the second is questionable. The first is suffering terribly from it's conjunction (by Google) with the second.

ErrantX• 17 years ago

I cant help but agree - I have to admit whenever I click through the support tabs on a projects site and see it go to a Google group my heart sinks.

dennisgorelik• 17 years ago

I wonder if Google would replace management of Google Groups team...

percept• 17 years ago

I wish Google Groups worked out better for moderators, because as a user it's the only message system I enjoy using (versus my 300th phpBB or vBulletin registration/confirmation/login cycle).

I know some groups have promoted frequent posters to moderator status and this helps with the workload (though it sounds like the jQuery group already does this and it's still too much).

forensic• 17 years ago

Even vBulletin requires manual spam control these days.

Spammers are more than happy to pay sweatshop wages to people who manually register and log in to site after site and post their spam until the account is hand-banned by a moderator.

richcollins• 17 years ago

I haven't had much trouble with it. I just moderate the first post by a user and let the rest through. This has prevented any spam from getting through to my 1200+ member group.

jamesbritt• 17 years ago

Same here. Perhaps I'm not moderating large enough groups for this to be an issue, but it's never been a hassle.

What I really like is that I get mail telling me there's a moderated post, and I can approve simply by replaying to the meta-message.

Now, it is annoying that every so often users with approved posts are not correctly then set as auto-approve, so there's some occasional intervention needed, but Google groups has worked quite well for the 4 or so groups I look after.

Coax• 17 years ago

Google Groups needs to switch to a Stack Exchange paradigm. I'm hard pressed to see what the disadvantage would be.

pwmanagerdied• 17 years ago

What? The systems are entirely different; they aren't designed for the same purpose and they aren't at all interchangeable.

JimmyL• 17 years ago

Stack Exchange is designed for one type of interaction: answering focused questions.

It's not appropriate for just putting an idea out there and discussing it, or for that matter even having a discussion about answers to an individual question.

motters• 17 years ago

I moderate a few small google groups, and have been having similar spam problems.

omouse• 17 years ago

I just went to see if my ISP still had a usenet server I could use so I could use a spam-filtering tool at home but it seems that Bell has discontinued it. Looking at a list of usenet servers, it seems that more than half of US ISPs and the major Canadian ISPs no longer have usenet servers :/

gord• 17 years ago

Google could solve the spam problem in groups, they've solved it in gmail.

That they havent, is most likely a symptom of their size and having so many balls in the air.

est• 17 years ago

Google Groups has severe privacy leak. If you post through the Google Groups Web UI, you can view the poster's IP & user-agent via individual message headers.

bartl2• 17 years ago

So?...

The idea is likely to more easily identify spammers.

c00p3r• 17 years ago

Go back to the school and learn what NNTP and Usenet were. =)

edgeztv• 17 years ago

An easy way for Google to fix the problem:

Lemma: most users are subscribed to Google Groups with their Gmail addresses.

Algorithm: GG should broadcast a new message to the Gmail accounts first and wait. If Gmail flags it as spam for p% of the receiving accounts, it should notify GG. GG should then send the message to spam (e.g. hold it for moderation), and not broadcast it to the rest of the subscribers. If Gmail gives it a green light, let it through.

mkelly• 17 years ago

Or hook Groups up directly to whatever spam filtering mechanism Gmail already uses. No idea if the architecture makes that easy or not.

bartl2• 17 years ago

Google Groups is basically just a window to newsgroups (AKA usenet). You can post to usenet directly, bypassing Google' posting police.

imraj• 17 years ago

I suppose google can't win at every project they undertake, the law of averages is bound to catch up. of course, there are other google projects with varying success, I use one called GWT whose succes is hard to measure

aravindhanv• 17 years ago

John,

Would you be interested in taking a look at Zoho Discussions (http://discussions.zoho.com/home) for your need? It is a powerful solution for setting up a user / developer community and is an offering from the Zoho suite of products. Zoho Discussions provides a lot of features (http://discussions.zoho.com/features) comparable (and in many respects better than phpBB).

Feel free to contact me at dhan [at] zohocorp [dot] com or support [at] zohodiscussions [dot] com to discuss this further. Will be more than happy to support you in any way we can. :)

And since we use jQuery across Zoho, and greatly benefit from the productivity it offers, I am happy to offer the entire solution for free for your website - for as long as you choose to run it.

Regards

Dhan

Product Manager, Zoho Discussions

sammyo• 17 years ago

A moderated usenet group with the moderation being a 'reletivly' simple filter works well. For misc.writing.screenplays.moderated the moderation is basically just no cross-posting. It's public, a few spams slip through but are easily ignored (other than when a writer has a lovely snark reply). Getting a moderated group is non trivial but no too difficult.

Google Groups is Dead

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