If you visit the aus.invest newsgroup, one of the first things you may notice is that most of the posts there are off-topic rubbish, political rants and scams.  This is an unfortunate reality with public access unmoderated newsgroups, there simply is no mechanism to stop immature or mentally disturbed people from making a nuisance of themselves.

Many people have simply retreated.  The group is considered almost dead, with the majority of traffic coming from trolls and spammers.  Some of the regulars have created a new Google Groups group, with a moderator who can ban spammers.  That group can be found at http://groups.google.com/group/aus_invest

If you are going to read the Usenet aus.invest, the best you can do is either learn to ignore such posts or get a newsreader program with filters which you can set up to "killfile" the idiots.  With filters in place, aus.invest is a much calmer place!

Most commonly used newsreader programs have "killfile" features built into them, but Google Groups does not.  If you read Usenet via Google Groups, you can install a free scripting program that plugs into Firefox called GreaseMonkey and then install Damian Penny's Google Groups Killfile script. 

This script will add a little X next to poster's names, and clicking that X will block that person's posts.  You'll find that blocking only a handful of people removes the vast majority of the junk because often it is only one or two deranged individuals who write nearly all the junk. 

Of course these people change their email addresses from time to time to get around your attempts to block them.  However, since blocking them is simply a matter of clicking an X once you can block their email addresses much faster than they can generate them.  

Contrary to what some people may think, there never really was a golden age of the newsgroup where all the posts were topical, reasoned and well written.  On Usenet, the gates to the asylum are always open.

Although those posts are obnoxious, there are intelligent people still posting there and in between the garbage there are still many thought provoking and worthwhile discussions and debates.