Links in Signature - Policy?

[Roshenk]

I have noticed a new trend in spam on the forum...the bots have mostly gone away (or been corralled by our brave moderators) but a new and more curious situation has arrived.

More and more posts appear now with what may be legitimate, if simplistic comments...such as "Great Shot" or some such wisdom, usually no more then a line. However at the bottom of each post or in the signature are several links to sites for such things as Cancun vacations and what not. These are posts which are designed to give sites more "Pings", which are one of the ways sites quantify how popular they are. As long as the link is reproduced somewhere on the net it counts as a Ping, even if it is not clicked.

Are these spam, despite the comment attached?

Perhaps we can impose a rule against links to sites that do not concern photography?

Opinions?

[gturner]

They are spam... I just feel bad for the mods.

[SwissJon]

These are just people working for SEO firms, rather than SPAM robots. Basically adding the link allows Google to rank someones website based on how many links back to it the Google spider finds while it's indexing this site. So they'll join the forum, leaving very short messages until their account gets blocked, then open another account and do the same thing.

I would think that since these are people, rather than robots, it's probably worth blocking the IP address of the computer that created the account, thus preventing the user from recreating an account.

I really don't understand why applications to join the forum aren't moderated, it would save a lot of work for the mods.

[Bruce A]

Just report it by clicking the top right (pink) rectangle at the post and it will go away - when the mods get to it.

[Nicole]

What Bruce said. We can't read every single post to see if they are spam. We do delete signature spam when we find it or when someone reports it. So please do.

[Roshenk]

This. We can't read every single post to see if they are spam. We do delete signature spam when we find it or when someone reports it. So please do.

That is precisely what I was asking....whether to report these or no. Thanks for the confirmation.

[dakwegmo]

That is precisely what I was asking....whether to report these or no. Thanks for the confirmation.

I'm not sure whether the mods appreciate it, but I tend to report anything that looks suspicious. It may not be obvious to you, but a moderator who deals with several of the same types of posts every day, will be able to make a quick decision about what to do with it.

[ArmySoldier777]

There was an account that showed up the other day, offering real advice for the situations that they posted in, and some of it was even halfway helpful. But their signature included links about a company for asian escorts.. Report time. Sometimes it's not that obvious though, so I'll just take a few seconds to click on their profile and click to view all their recent posts to get the whole picture.

[TNH]

I noticed one like that today that I reported. It seemed like a real person commenting, but the signature was full of stuff that said "iPhone apps" and "Cool android apps". And his name was actually "iphoneapps" or something. Looked suspicious to me, anyway.

[shocellist]

Whenever I see a post that might possibly be from a spam account, I look through that account's posts to see if there are other worthless messages.