@ton.yeung Sometimes it's not easy to tell the difference between someone that's trying to be helpful from someone that's trying to drive traffic to their site for ad revenue.

@ton.yeung It does if you see what the site looks like before the spam has been filtered out. Spammers and trolls often try to post junk on the site, sometimes to be disruptive, other times to make a profit. We try to keep the signal to noise ratio pretty high.

@ton.yeung That's the post that is in a gray area, not because of a single post, but because of a pattern by the OP. There are a lot of other posts that only last 15 minutes or so before being deleted that just promote a product or site. Most of the spam is pretty easy to figure out.

Sadly, the standard process of dealing with a spammer is fairly destructive from our view, so it's not easy to show examples off all the stuff that gets deleted. SE asks that we destroy things.

@ton.yeung We've edited out spam content from answers before when it's a good answer. Typically that's the last we see of the user because they didn't want the provide the good answer, they wanted to get their link advertised.

@ton.yeung I never said that

@ton.yeung there's deleted, then there's destroyed. SE asks that we destroy.

@ton.yeung who said I do it every time? The referenced answers above haven't been touched?

"so the SE policy is if it has a link to an owned website, its automatically spam." Nope. "its just that in general you view it as spam, but will not necessarily take action" Nope. If it's spam, we take action. If we don't take action, it's because we're not sure it's spam.

@ton.yeung But your observation is of us talking about a question and taking no action, but then taking the assumption that we took an action?

Well, to clarify, if someone is pushing a blog on this site, in my view, and I believe SE's view, that is a bad thing. My goal is to get good answers, not lots of links to people's personal blog.

There are many degrees of modding an answer, and many degrees of spam, so I try to make sure responses are appropriate. In this case, the OP is pushing it but hasn't exceeded my own threshold.

@ton.yeung That might take many hours to figure out, they are all judgement calls. Mods don't always agree with each other, but typically we try to make sure that we agree with the community at large.

Case in point, this question was the result of mods not agreeing with where to draw the line, community formed a consensus, and we follow their lead: meta.diy.stackexchange.com/questions/982/…

Scroll up to this chat message to see the conversation that spawned that one.

@ton.yeung haha, you're welcome to disagree and ask for a change in policy on meta. :)

By pretty far, it's only 2 answers right now. 3 strikes and they may get edited. But I hear SE has very reasonable advertising rates. :)

@ton.yeung Anyway, I'm off for the night, way past my bedtime. Have a good one.

Can we make a question about creating a table that floats in the middle of the room without touching anything, answer it with a recommendation for invisible legs that have all the support of real legs but are completely invisible and due to quantum physics you're able to pass objects directly through the legs as if they aren't there? Then we can close all the "how do I build a desk/table without any legs" questions as duplicates. </sarcasm>

@ChrisCudmore damn it, don't tempt me, lol