@SmokeDetector The text appears at least somewhat on-topic, so it's not as obvious that it's truly spam (it is, but not glaringly obvious). The link appears that it might be trying to provide attribution, but it's not. The linked site is a lawfirm that specializes in lawsuits about "contaminated food and water". The link goes to their main page, not one that is specifically about the subject in the question. Thus, the link appears to be more of a signature, rather than attribution.
@Chris For these two, it appeared a bit more complex than just what could be conveyed with a simple spam-flag. They are in what I consider the realm where someone that's familiar with the site needs to look at it to see if the content was something that the site desires to save (e.g. just edit out the signature). While I didn't consider these to be good answers, they are significantly closer to being answers than most spam (i.e. they at least address the questions).
In the past, we've had moderators be displeased with our spam-flagging similar looking posts (i.e. even from accounts like this one which appeared to be clearly created for a company and to promote their site/company). I've been surprised on a variety of occasions as to what various sites' moderators choose to keep. There have been some that are much closer to true spam which I've seen site moderators either leave on the site as-is or minimally edit.
Thus, IMO, it was something where the more conservative action of raising a custom flag was the more appropriate action. Doing so would bring it to the attention of your site's moderators (i.e. you). I was in the process of researching (e.g. going to the site from a protected/isolated environment and looking through the pages associated with ) and composing such a flag when I was called away, so would not have raised it until about when I posted my reply to the posts (above).
TL/DR (I should have put this first): So, the short answer is: the text was good enough that it was something to leave up to moderators rather than just spam flag. Such posts take longer to get responses together, if someone is going to do so. Many of the people that participate here just skip such posts.
@Makyen That pattern looks like it's already caught by Pattern-matching email in answer and Pattern-matching email in body; append -force if you really want to do that.
> Blacklisted website in answer, pattern-matching website in answer, potentially bad ns for domain in answer, potentially bad keyword in answer ---------- Blacklisted website in answer - Positions 37-52, 174-189: techsupport.com Pattern-matching website in answer - Position 12-48: https://www.photographerstechsupport Potentially bad keyword in answer - Position 0-12: <p><a href=" Potentially bad ns for domain in answer - photographerstechsupport.com NS suspicious seth.ns.cloudflare.com.,olga.ns.cloudflare.com.
@Makyen Matched by ^\s*<p>\s*(?:</?\w+/?>\s*)*<a href="(?!(?:[a-z]+:)?//(?:[^" >/.]*\.)*(?:(?:quora|medium|googleusercontent|youtube|microsoft|unity3d|wso|merriam-webster|oracle|magento|example|apple|google|github|imgur|stackexchange|stackoverflow|serverfault|superuser|askubuntu)\.com|(?:(?:lvcharts|php|jsfiddle|mathoverflow)\.net)|github\.io|youtu.be|edu|(?:(?:drupal|python|isc|khronos|mongodb|open-std|dartlang|apache|pydata|gnu|js|wordpress|wikipedia)\.org))[/"])\W*(?![\W\w]*?</(?:code|blockquote)>) on line 7060 of watched_keywords.txt
@Makyen 'foo<p><a href="https://www.photographerstechsupport.com/aws-amazon-web-services/installing-configuring-php-5-6-amazon-linux/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.photographerstechsupport.com/aws-amazon-web-services/installing-configuring-php-5-6-amazon-linux/</a></p>' is not caught by a blacklist or watchlist item.
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, blacklisted website in body, link at end of body, pattern-matching product name in body, +4 more (689): Weight Loss Formula by bostontilly9 on askubuntu.com
@Makyen Interesting, thanks for the explanation. We had a bit of spam lately (at least for our community), but this was indeed much more blunt. Sometimes these postings require more than just detection of a link...
@Makyen Oh, and this was curiosity, not a complaint.
@Chris It wasn't a problem. I assumed you were looking for an explanation as to why it wasn't flagged as spam as quickly as most of the spam posts that shows up.
In addition to the specifics for these posts, our autoflagging was down for several days due to problems with the SE API (related to HAProxy). It looks like your site saw a several spam posts stay up for quite a bit longer than they usually would (up to ~25 minutes). Fortunately, SE worked around the problem yesterday, so that should go back to normal.
