Spam Spotting

[EvianBaby]

I know everyone likes to be the one who 'outs' the spammers but when you post comments on something that is clearly an advert (and will eventually be removed) you keep making it appear in 'latest posts', thus pushing other (maybe) decent questions off.

Can't you just hit 'report' and leave be?

[bibblebub]

because it's an opportunity to have a bit of fun, sometimes rude, at the spammer's expense, safe in the knowledge that it will soon disappear

[EvianBaby]

Do you think there's someone sitting there reading the answers? I don't.

[wolf63]

The devil makes me do it

[bibblebub]

we ended up with some entertaining threads when the germans used to post early morning

[wolf63]

... but we didn't mention the war

[AB Editor]

Thank you for your comment EvianBaby.

We do prefer that the spammers get as little attention as possible in the vain hope that they will give up; which is why we very often delete posts that mention them as well.

Unfortunately, it is a never ending battle...

[emmie]

so it is.

[EvianBaby]

The fact that everyone knows the post will be removed makes it even more pointless to add answers to it.

Well, that's my daily grump out of the way.

[factor-fiction]

There is some merit in the idea. I suppose it's the same argument as 'don't feed the trolls'. I'm guilty with regards to commenting on spam sometimes and certainly with playing along with some of the Law threads from the poster with dozens of identities, but I do also report the spam and it disappears quickly.

On the other hand most of the spam occurs in the early hours and the often amusing banter on spam threads often occurs at around 7am when threads on the latest posts list would hang around for 20 minutes so the impact is not great.

[ChuckFickens]

Spam appearing in latest posts is a good way for the mods attention to be drawn to it, I quite often only spot an obvious spam question this way.