40 votes

Thank you to whoever removes spam from Ask Ubuntu

Not to put down Mithrandir's answer or Charcoal which indeed does a terrific job, but it's not only the awesome Charcoal folks and SmokeDetector who keep Ask Ubuntu clear of spam, it's also site ...
Zanna's user avatar
  • 70.4k
35 votes
Accepted

Obscure links to promote service

Good catch! You should flag this as spam since it is clearly spam. The OP is trying to hide their spam in a valid-sounding question. Actually, for such hidden things, a custom mod flag might be a ...
terdon's user avatar
  • 101k
33 votes

Thank you to whoever removes spam from Ask Ubuntu

You're welcome! ;) We're an organization known as Charcoal, or Charcoal-SE. Check out our website https://charcoal-se.org for some amazing spam detection! But seriously.... yeah, we're Charcoal, ...
Mithical's user avatar
  • 129
17 votes
Accepted

Homepage spammed

You have 101 reputation on AU, which was obtained for being a trusted user on other SE sites. You clearly don't even use AU, so why are you posting about this here? How can you claim to have knowledge ...
Nmath's user avatar
  • 12.3k
16 votes
Accepted

Spam edit in already closed question

I see three possibilities as to how that question ended up edited into spam: The account was compromised sometime between when the question was posted, 2018-11-23, and when it was edited into spam on ...
Makyen's user avatar
  • 105
14 votes

Automatic flagging of "keto" users with Reputation == 1?

I'm a room owner of SOCVR and a regular in Charcoal-HQ and those rooms are involved in fighting spam posts across the SE network. Thank you for noticing these spam posts and offering ideas to put a ...
rene's user avatar
  • 113
13 votes

Obscure links to promote service

This is one of those cases where I personally would flag for moderator's intervention because this is not so obvious of a case. Explain clearly that the post is spam and is disguised, point where the ...
Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy's user avatar
13 votes
Accepted

Should a post be flagged as spam if an author is clearly *not affiliated* with the promotion?

OmgUbuntu is not Spam; it is a much frequented Ubuntu blog and links to it pop up occasionally, and I don't believe we want such posts being Spam-flagged when we use links to it in chat or on the site,...
Videonauth's user avatar
  • 33.3k
11 votes

Spam edit in already closed question

If you suspect that something harmless-looking might be spam related, check whether it was plagiarized. That question was copied from another question, and the user's profile text was copied from ...
CL.'s user avatar
  • 1,745
10 votes
Accepted

Are new users banned from answering "highly active questions"?

The question got a lot of views quickly and then was automatically protected after three non-answers were posted by 1 rep users. As this happened ages ago (Aug 5th), I have unprotected the question ...
Mark Kirby's user avatar
  • 18.5k
10 votes

Why my spam flag has been declined?

The answer in question is not considered spam for several reasons. I will be quoting from Seth's answer on the related post about what constitutes spam to analyze this. Advertisement Is this an ...
Sergiy Kolodyazhnyy's user avatar
9 votes

New user promoting a single service - (subtle) spam?

I also think it's spam. None of the answers actually try to answer the question except to say "use this product/service". If the user would actually go into detail about how the product/...
Nmath's user avatar
  • 12.3k
8 votes

How can I report user profile as inappropriate?

You just did it. Nuked, from orbit. Thank you for pointing it out.
Oli's user avatar
  • 293k
8 votes

New user promoting a single service - (subtle) spam?

All three of this user's posts have been deleted as spam; this being said, they shouldn't be able to post answers anymore (the anti-abuse system is doing its job)
Thomas Ward's user avatar
  • 74.4k
7 votes

New user promoting a single service - (subtle) spam?

ThinLinc is 19 years old though. We used it at university [a long while back]. Yes, it's paid, but it had management features which made it more useful than the bare VNC servers of the day Not ...
Oli's user avatar
  • 293k
7 votes
Accepted

How can I report user profile as inappropriate?

To add to what Oli mentioned there is no direct way to report a profile. The feature was trialed for a bit, but removed. I don't remember why, but I believe there were too many reports for non ...
Seth's user avatar
  • 58.1k
5 votes

Are new users banned from answering "highly active questions"?

I have edited the answer from the new question into the stub answer posted by the OP and merged the new question into the old one which moved the answer there. I should probably have noticed that the ...
Zanna's user avatar
  • 70.4k
5 votes

Should a post be flagged as spam if an author is clearly *not affiliated* with the promotion?

In addition to Videonauth's answer, which points out that the site mentioned is popular with Ubuntu users and linking to it is not normally considered spamming, I would suggest that we can't actually ...
Zanna's user avatar
  • 70.4k
5 votes
Accepted

We should have an anti-spam filter at the 'Ask a question' stage

We already have an unofficial spam detection system. There's a bot called SmokeDetector which is maintained by some users that checks every new post on all sites using a great load of filters and if ...
Byte Commander's user avatar
  • 107k
4 votes
Accepted

Completely off-topic, promoting!

There's always spam around this time. Bots or people make new accounts and paste the stuff in. We have a bot in the AU chatroom that notifies us when something trips it. If it's spam, we all flag it ...
TheWanderer's user avatar
  • 19.4k
3 votes

Change in domain name

What to do with comments... I don't know if there's a better approach available than just manually removing all the comments that link to the old domain (and have thus become spam) and replacing them,...
Eliah Kagan's user avatar
3 votes

Suggested edits: is this spam?

Looks like vandalism to me. But as suggested it's an audit to determine if you are paying attention.
Elder Geek's user avatar

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible