Dealing with spammers' posts (1 Viewer)

Atomic Shrimp

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None of my business, really, but are spam posts usually deleted completely, or are they moved into a hidden forum?

Reason I ask is this: if they're moved to a forum hidden from users, but that forum isn't prohibited for search engine spiders, the spam posts could still be achieving the spammer's goal of creating multiple inbound links (I understand people do this to promote their site's ranking - the more inbound links the Google spider can find, the higher it will promote the thing in the page ranking).
 

Rabbie

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I believe they are deleted and not kept.
 

wazz

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they've been deleted as long as i've been doing it, probably always.

but, the 'reported posts' copy the original post's content into the report. i might be imagining this, but it seems like as long as the reported posts are not deleted along with the original spam-post, then we get hit with more spam. when i come in and clear out the reported posts it seems like the amount of spam goes way down. but, again, i could be imagining that.
 

Atomic Shrimp

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Interesting... It might be worth trying to find out if the bit where the reports are stored could be spidered by Google (although I expect it wouldn't, because the reports should be inside the bounds of the mods' individual mailboxes).

It might just be that spam occurs in cycles as the spammers develop new methods to work around filters, etc - and that each wave represents not a reaction to existing spam, but just more of the same.
 

wazz

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It might just be that spam occurs in cycles as the spammers develop new methods to work around filters, etc - and that each wave represents not a reaction to existing spam, but just more of the same.
probably so.
 

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