New Inappropriate Content Category for "Irrelevant Links"
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I have been noticing more and more posts on the forums where spammers are trying to make fairly relevant posts, but put spammy links in them. Could we have a way to flag a post for moderator attention because it has spammy links that need to be removed? If the mods could just get rid of the links, the post would be fine.
On the other hand, I'm not certain we would want those users around anyway since they are still spammers.
For example, take a look at jasonbaker and Karengilliam on this thread. Also, every comment on this story thread. I think that they are just trying to use the forum to post the links, but they are trying to do it in such a way that they look like legitmate users. If they get flagged with this new "spammy links", and a moderator removes the links, the system could send them a warning email or something.
Would it be possible to implement something like this? Does anyone have any better ideas?
Hi Questionmark,
there is already a way to flag such posts, see »Options -> Report Inappropriate Content«.
Much appreciated if you could help flagging SPAM, I do so all the time, but it's just too much SPAM to keep up flagging them just-in-time. In the beginning, TP-Link used filters in the (then) new forum to reject SPAM before being posted, but it was not very accurate and had way too much false positives, see here.
I already suggested alternative mechanisms to TP-Link's R&D such as:
- a mechanism for thread openers to delete SPAM on their own threads (does not help much for new threads or other people's threads containing SPAM),
- a mechanism to mark threads read-only after certain time has passed after the first post (requires to delete SPAM from them before-hand),
- a filter for links in post allowing only certain well-known sites such as TP-Link websites, Wikipedia etc. (does not help for text links),
- limited moderation rights with permission to delete SPAM posts for voluntary, long-term users such as you and me (would be best mechanism).
If SPAM is deleted immediately after being posted, the spammers would go away, I'm sure. Unfortunately, R&D currently is busy with other work, so they can't (yet) implement any of the mechanisms suggested above. But I hope they will give us a better mechanism to get rid of SPAM posts timely after spammers post it.
Anyway, please help to flag SPAM using the existing report form - this way such posts will at least be deleted by moderators ASAP. As of today, SPAM posts in this subforum are gone. 
Let's keep the SMB forum clean from SPAM - thank you for any help! 
Hello R1D2,
First off, I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said!
I have used the Report Inappropriate Content tool to flag a plethora of SPAM posts, and they have been taken care by the moderators. Rest assured that are not alone in your endevours! 
Yeah, it would be awesome to have some alternate mechanisms, but I guess we've got what we've got.
The meat of what I was getting at in this request was another catagory in the drop down of the reporting tool that would tell the moderator that the post may have good content, just a spammy link. If the link is removed, the post could possibly stay, because it itself is not bad. The examples that I linked to are kinda in that category.
On the other hand, perhaps it is better to just get rid of the posts entirely. If somebody actually has something real to add, they shouldn't be putting irrelevant/malicous links in there anyway. Those kinds of users aren't the kinds of users we want to have around anyway...
Hopefully others will stumble across your nice writeup here, and join the effort!
Thanks for your efforts!