Policy on Deleting Spam Posts

[MatthewV]

So the spam artists bump a few threads, post in a semi-relevant and coherent fashion. When is it best to delete it and when should they stay?

I guess my semi-arbitrary policy on removing spam that bumps threads or contains links has been going well.

[Zag]

Well, my personal policy is that I feel comfortable deleting any that clearly have no content and exist just for the spam. If they have any actual content and could conceivably be written with good intent, I leave it, but if they have URLs in their sig I empty the sig.

[MNOWAX]

Since I am a Mafia Mod, I do my best to delete random posts, but for the most part, I don't like to step "outside my bounds" If anyone wants to give me that authority, that's fine, but as it stands now, I'll just do my best to make fun of them.
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[Neo]

If it has a spam URL, I move the whole post to the spam forum, no matter how relevant it is.
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[Courk]

I've done what Neo's done, but I've not had an instance like Zag mentioned. If I did encounter actual content connected to spam, I'd probably just remove the spam.

[Quailman]

I've deleted them once or twice when the content was just a shameless promotion of whatever the sig linked to, like furniture or prescrption drugs. I happened upon one within two minutes after posting, so it almost never existed at all.

[Lepton*]

I do the same, although haven't done it recently.
Interesting content -> edit sig
Just spam -> move it

[MatthewV]

Spam threads are easy to take care of-- we even made a nifty button to do that. They go to a happy place instead of being deleted.

Spam posts cannot just be moved.

I am talking about things like the last post in this thread.
http://www.greylabyrinth.com/discussion/viewtopic.php?p=509776#509776

Obviously it is innocent enough that it didn't get deleted. And Stevenn has a yahoo account... so it may be a real person. But at the same time there isn't any real contribution to the topic.

[Neo]

So most of the recent spam posts are real people setting up accounts. Maybe at that point they start running a script or something, but I think it's more likely they make the posts themselves.

That's why I remove the entire post if the profile or post or sig contain spam URLs or mention products of some sort. I see it as a demoralizing move. (Reasonable, no, but that's how I feel).

Posts in the middle/at the end of topics can still be moved to spam forum. Simply click the "Split Topic" button, then select the options to split selected posts and move them to the spam forum. No muss, no fuss, and the spammer doesn't even have the option to re-edit the post, and the profile is removed from view.
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[Neo]

In the case of Steven, eh. No spam URLs means I'll ignore it. There's a slight possibility he found a link to the thread somewhere, or it came up in a search, and just didn't realize it was really old. Or didn't know better. Or something.

I'm not going to resort to profiling new posters.
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[Neo]

I saw a new post and read it, and it turns out that the user added the spam links to her post (possibly by sig? They'd been removed by the time I got there) after several replies had been made. On a hunch, I checked out a post I had noted, but it didn't contain spam. A spam sig had been added.

I still don't want to remove all Icarian posts if they don't meet my standards of grammar and flow, but I'm still okay with not allowing Icarian members to have signatures or be able to edit their posts.
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[Neo]

I was hoping there was some generic admin option to let me do that, but I suppose it'll probably take custom coding.
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[Zag]

I suspect that the easiest change would be in the code that generates URLs (either in the URL command or automatically because it recognizes one) and have it skip the step if the user is has fewer than X posts or has existed for less than X time.

If we also advertise such on the 'Create Account' page, then maybe they won't bother.

[Neo]

More likely they'd just make a bunch of crap posts until they hit the threshold.
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