The easiest and most effective way to clean up this (and any other
news group) is to filter the posts. Note that some of the poorer news
readers don't have effective filtering abilities, so if you have one of
those news readers, you'll need to download a free replacement. For
Windows users, one such free replacement is Xnews. It is available
at the URL

http://www.download.com/Xnews/3000-2164_4-10144167.html

The most important thing for a filtering news reader to allow you do
is to set up filtering rules based on ANY arbitrary header; not just
the "From" and "Subject" headers. Once you have the ability to do
that, you can remove all posts whose Message-ID or whose References
header contains the string "googlegroups.com". That will remove all
posts made through Google as well as all followups to such posts.

You will have cleaned up 90% of the glurge.

Next, you can add a set of rules which will kill all posts coming from
a specific news server, no matter what the poster may put in the From
field of his posts. That's a little more complicated, but worth it,
and it is done by specifying a filtering rule which examines the
Path header of all posts. More of the glurge can be eliminated by
using the filtering rule

Path:.*news\.usenetzone\.com![^!]+$

to kill all posts which originate at usenetzone.com. That takes care
of nearly all the rest of the glurge, because it eliminates all posts
produced by kb9rq under all of his sock puppets.

It is equally easy to add more Path filtering rules to kill other
obnoxious news sources, such as the anonymous remailers that some
posters hide behind. In that case, some of the remailers have
helpfully put the strings "nym.alias.net" or "sewer-output" in the
Path header, and those posts can be eliminated with the additional
filters

Path:.*nym\.alias\.net
Path:.*sewer-output

Messages which are crossposted to many news groups are also very
likely to be garbage, and to cut out cross posts, you can filter on the
Xref header. For example, the following filter eliminates all posts
which have been crossposted to more than three news groups:


To eliminate all crossposted messages, you can use the filter


to do the job.

Example: Before entering rrap, my news reader showed a count of 90
posts. After selecting the news group and filtering it with the rules
given above, only five posts remained.

Guess rrap is actually dead.