In message , Franz Heymann
writes

"Nick Maclaren" wrote in message
...

I go away for 10 days, and there are 11,000 messages waiting in
uk.rec.gardening. Does this say something about UK gardeners
(and/or Pete the Troll)?

Huh?

I have never had 1100 messages per day in uk.rec.gardening

Franz

There have been a couple of puerile flooding attacks on u.r.g recently
using random computer generated junk. If you are lucky someone will have
already have cancelled them before you download the newsgroup. Not all
mail servers honour cancel messages though so YMMV.

Typically they seem able to flood with about 10000 items an hour. There
are other ways of filtering the dross depending on your news client.

If you don't mind a small risk of collateral damage reject everything
with headers containing :

NNTP-Posting-Host: 81.102.253.101

Some of the searchable newsgroup archives were messed up by this.

Doubtless the next attack will come from some other insecure host

Regards,
--
Martin Brown