7

This user is clearly spaming the site.

He has his company link twice in his profile (hint 1).

Then he asked this when it's offtopic and he identifies himself as a vpn company. Another link to himself.

Afterwards he answer this question twice. Of course there are a link to his own site in both answers. None of them has any quality content in them, nor are related to the question. They are likely just copy-pasted, as one even refences generic Windows problems.

What can we, as users do about it?.

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    Flag them as spam and wait for moderators? Dec 30, 2010 at 12:52
  • 2
    Flagging (if you can't edit) is fine. Even if you can edit you don't need to edit out links - leaving a comment that this appears to be spam should suffice warning other users. Dec 31, 2010 at 16:27
  • It's not about users. They are not trying to lure users into their site. It's about search engines, Google in particular. Links from high rank sites like this one do wonders to their search position. If we left the links, they succeed, an we encourage more spam. Jan 3, 2011 at 7:44

1 Answer 1

8

First, flag them.

I thought about it when I read them, and my solution for the time between flagging them and a moderator deleting them is to

  • delete the links, i.e. remove the hyperlink but leave the text

    or

  • change the links to tinyurl-previews, if their modest advertising instead of malicious spam

You can also just go ahead and delete the entire post, replacing it with (spam removed) or something like that, if you think it improves the site. I haven't encountered any spam where that seemed appropriate to me, but I'm relatively sure nobody would be upset if you did it anyway.

And lastly, this especially if you don't have the reputation to edit posts:

  • Go to the chat and ask someone else to do it for you

  • As Marco suggested, leave a comment on the post.

We're all concerned about spam and we'll all be glad to help, I dare saying. :-)

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    Why tinyurl previews? If I want to preview the unchanged link, I can do it right in the browser. Links are already marked rel="nofollow", so tinyurl has absolutely no advantages here.
    – Fred Nurk
    Jan 1, 2011 at 9:53
  • I chose to make them tinyurls with preview so that the user doesn't have to visit a spam site, which is potentially malicious and to - hopefully - discourage this kind of behaviour by keeping the number of hits from AskUbuntu to a minimum. No idea if spammers actually pay any attention to the number of hits from different referrers though. Jan 1, 2011 at 23:29

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