Gotcha. Well, then these should be helping a lot, then. They look like bad Markov chains with buzzwords thrown in. Shouldn't be too hard to find a blocking pattern, but then, I'm not so knowledegable there.
@JonEricson No worries, this isn't the only thing that SE keeps under wraps, and it makes perfect sense to do it.
Interesting, I just noticed they're using BBCode instead of Markdown.
As Shog said, you're pretty spot on with your observations.
In fact, we had not fully realized just how much of a problem anon spam suggested edits actually were until we got the new system in place.
The good news is it's working, and it's working very well. Behold, 1800 things that didn't ann...
@JonEricson oooh! Thanks for this. It's good to see that they've seen the BBCode and email address comments too
I'm also interested in why specifically this post. It's got low views, and doesn't seem to be linked anywhere interesting (twitter once or twice, but amongst a bunch of other questions)
@JonEricson Hm. Ok that helps, but there are still plenty of short ones out there. Oh well, we'll probably never know for sure anyway.
@JonEricson Yeah. One has to wonder how intelligent the spammers are, or at least how much work they've bothered to put into their bot.
If I were making one....
;)
Anywho, if you do get a chance to speak with Tim, I'm curious about why captchas aren't being used on anonymous editors, especially on posts that have already seen a lot of spam.
(I just spammed by own post and saw no captcha, though maybe I didn't exhibit bot-like behavior. Still, forcing it would help with these, a lot)
That's mind-boggling. If they're paying people (even miniscule amounts), one would imagine they wouldn't bother with sites that never let spam through.