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SI - Site Forums : SI Spammer Hall of Fame -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SI Dmitry (code monkey) who wrote (3746)	2/16/2013 12:55:54 AM
From: Jorj X Mckie	Respond to of 4105

I like it!

To: SI Dmitry (code monkey) who wrote (3746)	2/16/2013 1:22:18 AM
From: Jeffrey S. Mitchell	Respond to of 4105

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

To: SI Dmitry (code monkey) who wrote (3746)	2/16/2013 1:25:36 AM
From: B.K.Myers	Respond to of 4105

I like the idea, but rather than blocking all links, could you white list the links to legitimate sites (yahoo, seekingalpha, wikipedia, online.wsj, etc.)?

To: SI Dmitry (code monkey) who wrote (3746)	2/16/2013 1:51:54 AM
From: clean86	Respond to of 4105

Good idea but like Jeffrey said in his response probably won't have any more of an effect than what is being done to eliminate the spam now. It seems that none of these messages stays live for more than a couple of minutes as it is so it seems like a lot of extra coding for little outcome. When I worked in a School district we used to block certain website from being access from inside the labs not for censorship but because they were inappropriate for the age group. We know the sites these messages are sending people to couldn't you just make a filter that would block the links to those sites so that even if people clicked on them they would do nothing? There are also Legal ways to stop these guys maybe a nice Official cease and desist order would get their attention.