I would say you're right..........but in June and July we had here a
true war against trolls: a few IPs have been able to create tens of
IDs, each seemingly having its own photo. Probably downloaded from
other websites.
If "obliged", I'm afraid spammers wouldn't have difficulties in doing
the same.

Regards
Aldo

On Nov 7, 6:18 pm, Rick Wagner wrote:

I'm sorry, but I must to steal your thread, given that there's someone
around who like to play with one-star ratings.

This is a link to a message I saved, and where I summarized what truly
happened in this group from June of this year 2009:
http://groups.google.com/group/Managing-Your-Group/browse_thread/thre...
Unfortunately it won't explain better what I said above...........it's
not difficult to create IDs with seemingly legitimate pictures. The
guy posting in that thread didn't.
Actually, you should go back to June and July, in part August too,
archives for having an idea.

But the main point is: until May 2009, Virden and I were used to share
almost fifty-fifty the answers in this group, apart a few we were
fully unable to find an answer.
I'm rather sure that when there's not an answer, it's because Google
is changing some features, and us members of this group can indirectly
understand what's happening just following all the messages of this
group.
Another thing Virden and I were doing has been to direct unaware
people to the - few - official Google communications. Actually, Virden
has been attacked just because some angry people didn't understand the
utility of this behavior, in the case of the new way of "flagging"
groups as potentially or actually  spamming groups.
Evidently in these last months Google improved its evaluation
parameters, because false positives are quite rare, now.

Anyway, what happened around June 5 was that Virden had enough of
being so shamelessly attacked, and actually stopped to help and
answer......I'm still hoping not forever. I continued, though, with
the help of few friends, until finally some Google employee succeeded
in fixing the situation, at least from the point of view of
neverending flames.
Why should I stop now to answer, if I didn't it in worse times?

Regards
Aldo