GroupServer vs Google Groups

The recent decision to remove the JQuery mailing list from Google Groups
raises the question of how GroupServer compares with Google Groups.

jQuery is a public Google Group
   http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-en
with 21,000 members and around 100 posts per day.

John Resig, of the jQuery project, believes Google Groups to be useful
for private groups, but is concerned
   http://ejohn.org/blog/google-groups-is-dead/
about the failure of Google Groups to manage spam in public groups.

Presumably because they are such a large target, public Google Groups
attract spam almost as soon as they are open.

Apparently, by spoofing the from address, it is so easy to spam a public
Google Group that even the moderators have to be on moderation, or risk
their own email address becoming identified as a source of spam. Resig
concludes that this is because there the spam-filtering of google Groups
is either very poor, or absent.

Resig also criticises Google Groups' moderation for failing to notify
users that their post is in a moderation queue, leading to frequent
resubmission of the post. And he is less than complimentary about the
design of the moderation UI.

Finally, Resig complains that the entire group disappeared for nearly a
day, and that there is no way to export post, and laments Google's
silence in response to support messages, and slowness to address any of
these issues.

Would I recommend moving the jQuery list to GroupServer? Clearly, you
can create a site that is not as much of a spam target as Google Groups.
Even OnlineGroups.Net does not yet have such a problem with spam. The
21,000 members, however, would probably attract some attention before
long. As far as I know, Groupserver will also process messages with
spoofed from address.

We know that GroupServer's moderation system is nothing to write home about,
   https://svn.iopen.net/projects/groupserver/ticket/249
that GroupServer has many UI flaws, and is untested with a list that has
21,000 members. The site-side UI has no way to export posts. These are
all known issues,
   https://svn.iopen.net/projects/groupserver/
but like any small team, we can be overcome with a large development and
support load.

On the up-side, a spam filter such as SpamAssasin can be deployed, as it
has at OnlineGroups.Net. In fact this is necessary simply to reduce load
on the post-processing subsystem. I do not know how effective this would
be at reducing spam apparently sent by group members.

Richard, could you comment on this?

The main advantage that GroupServer has in tackling some of the problems
besetting Google Groups is that it is open source. If you don't want to
rely on the hosting provided at OnlineGroups.Net, you can install and
host your own instance of GroupServer. You can tweak its configuration
to achieve the performance you need, and where you find problems in the
code or UI, you can fix them yourself. As this gains momentum, there is
the potential for GroupServer to evolve rapidly.

Finally, if you don't like it, you can export the archives directly from
the database.

My conclusion: right now, GroupServer does not offer a magic bullet to
the problems experienced with the jQuery list. If, however, people who
run large technically-oriented lists do begin to adopt GroupServer, it
has the potential to provide a flexible and scalable platform offering
control over configuration and code.