Firefox Greasemonkey Kills Google Groups Spam

If you read Usenet newsgroups, no doubt you'd be familiar with spam messages spruiking credit, fake jewellery, external organ enlargements and free graduate degrees. On a PC, you can use killfiles in newsreading software to ignore spam messages. If you're reading newsgroups using the Google Groups web-based reader with Firefox, you can ignore annoying spam messages using a Greasemonkey script called Google Groups Killfile (GGK).

You can add entries to your killfile list using GGK's context menu but the list becomes hard to view and manage once you have a lot of entries. It is easier to edit GGK's kill list variable:

• Enter "about:config" in Firefox's location bar.
• Enter "kill" in the Filter field.
• Click on greasemonkey.scriptvals.www.penney.org/Google Groups Killfile.GoogleKillFile and edit the configuration string.

2008-04-14: If you use regular expressions (RE), you can reduce the number of entries in the killfile list by using wildcards and the "alternate" operator (vertical bar symbol ("|")). You can further reduce the number of patterns to define by specifying case-insensitive comparison in GGK. Just search for the REs' "compile()" function in the GGK script and add a second "i" argument.