Dmitry, I come from a programming background and understand the "fun" challenge to thwart spammers technologically. However, in this and most "professional" spam cases, I don't think it will be at all effective. These guys are not on commission (i.e. paid by the number of new customers they bring). Rather, they get paid a fee to get the message out as effectively as possible. If that means posting something like Hot Stock Discussion every day on siliconinvestor dot com, that's what they'll do. In other words, disabling a link just makes them change strategy, not stop. You'll still want such posts deleted anyhow, hence the annoyance factor will not have changed.
That being said, if you just hate the idea that a spammer might actually pick up a customer on SI via an impulse click on a live link, then I would slightly modify your approach. Rather than disable all links, why not just disable the shortcut links. As for the full links, it shouldn't be that hard to create a filter for the handful of the sites being spammed and not allow them to be rendered properly to be clicked on.
- Jeff |
