Want To Know What “Sporging” Is?

Some Google Groups users are discovering their groups are falling victim to “Sporgery attacks”. Now, the problem isn’t actually a Google Groups problem, but rather a Usenet (Newsgroups) problem, but the close connection between Usenet and Groups means a lot of people who might never have heard of the term are now suffering from it.
So, what is “Sporging“? The word is a combination of spam and forgery, referring to a spam attack on a newsgroup that not only floods the newsgroup with a ton of posts to disrupt regular discussions, but forges the usernames of regular active posters to make it appear that the regular users of the forum are saying offensive things.
The origin of the word comes from the Scientology Internet wars of the 1990s, where the usernames and email addresses of anti-Scientology posters were appended to posts from pro-racism newsgroups and reposted. Over the course […]

Original post by Nathan Weinberg