Why obfuscate SPAM instead of delete?

[FakeOutdoorsman]

Most of my time spend in the forums is at Multimedia & Video and Multimedia Production where I see a good number of spam threads promoting video conversion and iPod software. These are all for Windows or Mac and are usually not free. I assume most are just GUIs for FFmpeg and are good candidates for the FFmpeg Hall of Shame because of their GPL and/or FFmpeg license violations.

I've reported dozens of these, but sometimes the post are kept while the links are changed. You can see an example if you search for cucusoft. Why are they not deleted instead? This will reduce some forum "search noise" at the very least, and I assume, may also help reduce their Google presence.

[bodhi.zazen]

Can you give an example please ? linky ?

[FakeOutdoorsman]

Can you give an example please ? linky ?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1159833
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1142155
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1104861

[philcamlin]

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1159833
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1142155
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1104861

you do have a point there

[Elfy]

If they weren't reported then they will still be there - unfortunately we don't read all the posts

They'll be gone shortly ...

[Elfy]

you do have a point there

this is almost like posting the answer after someone has already done so

[FakeOutdoorsman]

If they weren't reported then they will still be there - unfortunately we don't read all the posts

They'll be gone shortly ...

Yes, I understand they will still be there if not reported, but I assumed that a moderator edited the links to these sites (unless there is some sort of forum plugin that does this automatically on certain keywords). Otherwise, why would the OP make a spam post and point it to a non-qualified domain name?

Edit: Thanks for deleting those, by the way.

[overdrank]

Yes, I understand they will still be there if not reported, but I assumed that a moderator edited the links to these sites (unless there is some sort of forum plugin that does this automatically on certain keywords). Otherwise, why would the OP make a spam post and point it to a non-qualified domain name?

Edit: Thanks for deleting those, by the way.

I may have been an error on the spammers part. You would see if it was edited by a moderator.

[bodhi.zazen]

Yes, we do block some spam with the language filter. Thus spam links are sometimes broken (we call it the "game over" plugin).

Do you like it ?

One of the small pleasures of being an admin

[dmizer]

Yes, I understand they will still be there if not reported, but I assumed that a moderator edited the links to these sites (unless there is some sort of forum plugin that does this automatically on certain keywords). Otherwise, why would the OP make a spam post and point it to a non-qualified domain name?

A moderator did not edit the post. If so, there would be a tag at the bottom of the thread indicating who edited the post. Since those links are so common, they are automatically filtered. This is helpful for two reasons:
1) This way, the link is never indexed by google.
2) Since the spam post would otherwise include huge in-line images, every time someone opened the thread, the spam site would get click-through traffic.

The idea here is to disarm the spam even before we get a chance to remove it.