A cancelbot is an automated or semi-automated process for sending out third-party cancel messages over Usenet, commonly as a stopgap measure to combat spam.[1]
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One of the first recorded cancelbots was created in June 1994 by Arnt Gulbrandsen within minutes of the first post of Canter & Siegel's second spam wave,[2][3], as it was created in response to Canter & Siegel's better known "Green Card spam" in April 1994. [4] Usenet spammers have alleged that cancelbots are a tool of the mythical Usenet cabal.
Cancelbots must follow community consensus to be able to serve a useful purpose, and historically, technical criteria have been the only acceptable criteria for determining if messages are cancelable, and only a few active cancellers ever obtain the broad community support needed to be effective.
Pseudosites are referenced in cancel headers by legitimate cancelbots to identify the criteria on which a message is being canceled, allowing administrators of Usenet sites to determine via standard "aliasing" mechanisms which criteria that they will accept third-party cancels for.
Currently, the generally accepted criteria (and associated pseudosites) are:[5]
Pseudosite | Criterion |
---|---|
Breidbart Index above the cancel threshold for the group or hierarchy | cyberspam!usenet |
"Make money fast" schemes | mmfcancel!cyberspam!usenet |
"Spew" (large number of nonsense or repeated postings) | spewcancel!cyberspam!usenet |
Binary files posted to a group that doesn't allow them | bincancel!cyberspam!usenet |
Retromoderation (only applies to groups that have a retromoderation policy in place) | retromod!cyberspam!usenet |
Ad cancels within the biz.* hierarchy | adcancel!cyberspam!usenet |
Messages originating from sites or networks under active Usenet Death Penalty (UDP) sanction by the community; the UDP is exceedingly rare, requiring a broad consensus that a Usenet site is acting in a manner generally harmful to the community, and active cancellation under a UDP is even rarer still | sitenameudp!udpcancel!cyberspam!usenet |
By general convention, special values are given in X-Canceled-By, Message-Id and Path headers when performing third-party cancels. This allows administrators to decide which reasons for third-party cancellation are acceptable for their site: