We have quite a lot of spam here too recently.

At least with a newsreader you can filter the spam author that you don't see him - until he changes his identity again.

The problem of usenet is not so much the spam, but the bigger problem is that many people don't know abouit it and that lots of good discussions are taking place in web forums these days.

I have thought about writing some SW to convert web forums into a nntp readable format.

Not easy, as there so many different forum softwares. Actually, the web forums should provide nntp access, not very difficult to implement. They already have all postings in a database.