Answered Advertising

[Leggy]

I can't help but notice that we're seeing a fair bit of threads with advertising and misleading titles, scattered in various sections, lately.

I've been reporting them when I see them, and you've been excellent about clearing them out.

I was just wondering if junk like that is just par for the course, or if it's been showing up more than usual?

 

[pingtoryan]

Spambots...

 

[Ignis]

Apologies for the late response. A lot's happened recently.

I was just wondering if junk like that is just par for the course, or if it's been showing up more than usual?

It's the latter. While a site as large as ours will never have a spam-free ride, our filters would usually catch the vast majority of spambots before they could ever go live.

We suspect spambot coders have recently figured out new ways to bypass anti-spam measures we have in place (as they regularly do―it's always been an arms race between spammers and filters). Note that it doesn't mean our filters have been rendered useless, as for every spam post that you and other regular members can see, there are ten others that you don't because they were caught in the net before they went live.

We realise the clickbait titles employed by the spam authors are often political in nature, which not only go beyond the kind of discussions we allow on this site, but also may be distasteful to some. We'd like to apologise if this is the case. On the other hand, we're very grateful to you and others who keep reporting spam threads wherever you spot them. You've been helpful in pinpointing us to locations we otherwise might've missed.

 

[Leggy]

Yeah, it seemed like I was spotting more than I usually do. So it's a constant race between spammers and filters.

Thanks for keeping on top of things!

 

[Ignis]

Our pleasure.

Thread locked.