If you read rec.sport.disc via Google Groups or some other spam-laden interface, I worked up an alternative with Yahoo Pipes. Here is a spam-filtered pipe of new RSD topics, and here is a spam-filtered pipe of all RSD messages.

Both those pages include various other subscription options, including RSS, e-mail, and others. Clicking any headline will bring you to the post in Google Groups, where you can read as usual. If there are certain authors you want to filter out you can use my Toadless script.

Another cool thing—and this is key—look for the “Clone” link on the filtered results above. This feature allows you to make your own version of the pipe (it has a nice, non-technical interface) should you want to filter out particular authors, or if the spammers change habits and stuff starts sneaking through. You can customize it to fit your own needs, and then use your cloned pipe instead of mine.

So far, the above plus Toadless pretty much fixes RSD for my purposes.

P.S. What you REALLY want is to subscribe to the pipes above using a newsreader. They are great for keeping up with various Ultimate weblogs and RSD at the same time (and any other sites that offer newsfeeds, for that matter). Google Reader is a great one, here’s a little intro from Google.

If you read rec.sport.disc via Google Groups, which lacks a killfile that you’d get with a dedicated usenet reader, and wish you could see less of Toad, I wrote a little script that hides his posts. You have to use Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed. If you are, click (toadless.user.js) to install my script, and it will hide Toad’s posts when you view a thread. Actually, it replaces them with an innocuous little placeholder, like so:

Also, you can pretty easily update it to hide posts from any user that you don’t want to read anymore. To do that, right-click the monkey in the lower-right corner of Firefox, and go to “Manage User Scripts” -> Toadless -> Edit. Scroll down to line 50 and follow the instructions there.

You might want to also check out my RSD spam workaround. Between this and that, RSD is readable to me again.

UPDATE 7/21/09: The script looks a little different from the example above, but the idea remains the same. It now plays nicer with Google’s expand/collapse code, and you can click any hidden post to reveal it, on the off-chance you need/want the context.