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This may be due to moderator inaction.

I moderate an Apache project mailing list and the amount of spam it receives on on some days is silly. However thanks to the good work done by the ASF infra team it takes very little effort from ML moderators to keep the spam from reaching subscribers.

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Usenet works differently.

Moderated groups are their own category and quite rare. Every post to them has to be pre-approved.

The large majority of groups (including comp.lang.c) are unmoderated. "Moderator inaction" isn't a thing here because moderation isn't even technically possible.

A few groups will run a cancel-bot on most blatant spam though, which is a slightly practical solution although not quite in the spirit of Usenet. And acceptance of cancel messages downstream will vary a lot.

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