Well thought out and excellently stated....another possibility is a "pop over" informational box that would come up and gray out the rest of the screen that replaces or reinforces the info box to the right. (this would be like the one that omgubuntu.co.uk has. it only shows up the first time you visit the site or if you clean your cookies, and goes away if you click the screen behind it)

A case in point: last month I was testing a backup by restoring it to /temp but made a mistake and restored as root. This changed the permission of my /temp folder to root for all functions, this caused a loop when trying to log in even as guest as all the files that should have been created at login were not able to be written to /temp. Booting from a LiveUSB and searching AU it took me less than 5 minutes to find a question that had the same symptoms and fix my screw up and get booting again....Well written question and answer=tech support.

While I agree that the "log dump" type questions you refer to are worthless, I have to disagree that we "are not tech support". You could rephrase it to say "we are not professional tech support" which would be true of most of us, "not paid" goes without saying. Good tech support questions can and are answered here on a regular basis. The key word here is "good", others are useless, as you stated in your question.

yea, I can see that some might end up a mod just because it was the easiest thing to do at the time....I was just wondering if there was some overarching policy on AU or SE in general that was the reason....It just seemed odd to me is all....

"Forcing them to be mods against their will would be unfair" yes I agree, I was not asking for conscription, as I said in my question "they would be free to turn the nomination down" So if they did not want it they need not accept the nomination. Some potentially good mods may be too self effacing to put themselves forward but would be willing to accept a nomination by another. If the community at large disagrees with the opinion of the user who nominated the potential mod that would all come out in the Primaries.....

@JourneymanGeek I was considering doing just that, and likely will. I was just wondering why it is not possible to nominate another user, that is the way it works in most "clubs"(a group of people sharing a common interest as opposed to a political election)

+1, "And if you get stuck Askubuntu!" I think you are correct, this has a lot to do with new user and them asking duplicate questions. It's great that Canonical sends users here so that they can get help and not give up on Ubuntu and great that we help them do just that. However it is a double edged sword, new users may be less likely to search for duplicates before posting their question and are almost certainly less likely to know if a particular answer could help them if the issue is the same but is not verbatim to their issue. =duplicate questions=lower answer rate....

so it is likely that this particular user will be deleted as most of his posts are plagiarisms? Seth said yes in the above comments but as you have the "magic diamond" next to your name, could you verify that that is true? (some of his posts give attributions, but are still just word for word C&P's) or would his "stolen" posts just be removed?

this one might need to be made into 2 more specific(restoring lost files/restoring filesystem) reason: Windows OS uses "restore" as a blanket statement for "fix my broken system", "find a lost file" (i.e. restore points as a system recovery)-users coming from Windows will be likely to try to use "restore" as a tag and without a suggestion popping up to point to one of the options, may not know how else to get to a tag that would be appropriate...in fact searching by the tag shows many low rep, hence newer users using this tag...I would argue against anything that would discourage them

@vasa1 I agree that registration does not stop it, my timing was just bad, I was not actually butting into your and Seth's back and forth, it just seemed that way, Mine was just a general comment in regards to the OP's Q&A. in the last few hours it seems that the spammers have read the OP's post and have taken it as a challenge....I have seen 3 or 4 spam post in the last 2 hours....{sigh}

There are determined ones creating account(or maybe bot registrations?) to post their spam as a question...here is an example user...

I don't want to start a whole new discussion or a flame war, but, I also tend to avoid ubuntuforums as well, while it's not spam it's hard to sort through 5 pages of useless discussion looking for some useful info. I only include this as a contrast to show how good(more useful) I think AU is compared to any other site I use and as a testimony to the designers of AU as well as the community at large of how good of a job they are doing, not as a slam to the ubuntuforums, they do provide useful info, I just have a harder time using them....

Yes I have seen other sites and the spam on them, which is why I tend to avoid them. I think I read somewhere on AU(can't find it now of course) that part of our philosophy is that user reg. is not required so that would be out anyway so I was not suggesting it, good point about spam reg. BTW.

I suspected that prevention was nearly impossible(hence the subtitle of the question). I was just curious if this was an ongoing problem that I just haven't encountered before or something new that needed to be dealt with. You answered both quite well, TY. I have seen quite a few instances of spam being posted as answer or questions, an knew that those are impossible to prevent and can only be mitigated by requiring a user to register before posting...

@Jeremy a CW seems like a good solution, why is it a controversial issue??