@HighlyIrregular thanks for the comments and flag. Note that when you remove a link you suspect is spam, you do make it harder for anyone else to flag it. Yes, I do understand the argument about removing the incentive, but we already have a bunch of measures for that, that all kick in after a post has been flagged 6 times as spam and deleted.

If that mechanism gets hindered, then it ends up making it harder to stop spam, not easier.

HighlyIrregular wrote:

> The exact same question is here: candlepowerforums.com/vb/… and in approx 10 other websites by the look of it... sadly other peoples time is being wasted by this cleverly disguised spam.

Mods don't deal with copyright violation. As a matter of principle. If a copyright holder wants to enforce, they need to send a DMCA notice to StackOverflow Inc.

We do deal with plagiarism violation; but in this case, I believe that the copies I've see are by the same poster.

And if an advertiser starts generating genuinely useful content, it could be described as cleverly diguised spam. And also as "mission accomplished":

@EnergyNumbers I'm not sure removing the link is a problem. A moderator can flag a post as spam himself. This will delete the post and mark it as spam, so it will be picked up by the automatic spam detection system. BTW, the IP address of this user matches that of the 'renesola-spammer' I mentioned earlier. So, I've flagged the post and destroyed the account.

BTW, the first time this user was active, I also just removed the link and let it go. But I found later that the user didn't respond to any requests for clarification on his question. Instead he started posting strange answers and comments all with the same spam-link. That's why I decided to remove new posts and accounts of this user on first sight.

Thanks for the chat invitation... would it be better to edit the entire question out and replace it with a message "Please ignore... this was just spam" or similar? Would be good to be clear on the best course of action, as there will probably be more from the same source in future, unfortunately.