Happy New Year!

Don't start a spam campaign.
I am watching you.

Such a warm welcome.

Well, unfortunately we see a lot of spam attacks here in the forum and they usually start with posts like your's to test the waters (no forum history, no real content or totally irrelevant content, etc).

If you are not planning on starting a spam campaign: Happy New Year.

If you are planning on starting a spam campaign: don't.

And thank you for reporting my post. Well received.

As I said: if your intent was purely wishing a "Happy New Year", than great. You have nothing to fear anyway. But unfortunately we need to observer posts like yours because in 99,9% of all cases they are used to spam the forum later.

That is why I am watching.

holch wrote:

And thank you for reporting my post. Well received.

As I said: if your intent was purely wishing a "Happy New Year", than great. You have nothing to fear anyway. But unfortunately we need to observer posts like yours because in 99,9% of all cases they are used to spam the forum later.


 

I know that. I was in the same position, as you, until a few months ago. I was deflecting spam & a post like this is suspicious.

The difference between my way of handling it and yours is, that I had a couple of rules.

1. Innocent until proven guilty. -> You shouldn't have posted anything & start watching my behaviour. Then, after some time, you would notice, that this would be my only post & I wouldn't even edit my profile to add a link. Id est my profile is legit.
2. My profile picture is very specific & not generic. This speaks against my profile being just for spam. Most spam profiles have no picture or show some generic stock person.
3. My Nickname is not some generic American name like JohnSmith or something. My name is pretty specific. It is also not some short word with a random number attached to it, which is also a sign of a spam profile.
4. My post was extremely terse. Spam posts are usually larger & talk about useless stuff, mainly consisting of fillers, instead of content/information. If no link is provided yet, the post may be edited later to include a link. Again, you should've checked that, after waiting and you would've seen, that I'm not editing my post, because I would've forgotten about it in a week, anyway.
5. Always assume the best of people, not the worst. -> Last time I asked for support for a game on Steam, someone replied something like "your game version is old, you probably pirated that game", completely ignoring the possibility that I just got the game on a different platform. In this example, I actually got it from GOG, rather than Steam. Yet, the first thing that moron assumed was the worst of me. He didn't even know me. He just saw that version & assumed I pirated a game. What a prick.

Basically 1 & 5 are the most important rules for handling spam. If you are not sure, keep watching. Wait until you are sure & then get rid of the problem.

There are situations, where this does not work well, for example, if there are millions of spam posts every month. However, I assume this forum gets new posts like this fairly rarely.

That said, I have also seen "legit" posts with spam in it. They were legitimately asking a legitimate question, which could be legitimately answered. Still, there was a link hidden in the question.
Now, the question is, is it spam? Yes, but it is de facto also not spam, because the content is legitimate.
The way I handled such situations is to keep the post, but remove the link. This way, both worlds are happy.

Nevertheless, please assume the best of people. If you don't know, just assume it's legitimate.

Well, there are different ways to handle this, I agree.

At the beginning I just observed, but lately I have switched to give a little warning ahead.

Innocent until proven guilty. -> You shouldn't have posted anything & start watching my behaviour. Then, after some time, you would notice, that this would be my only post & I wouldn't even edit my profile to add a link. Id est my profile is legit.

Spammers are getting better. They add profile information, pictures, etc.

My profile picture is very specific & not generic. This speaks against my profile being just for spam. Most spam profiles have no picture or show some generic stock person.

While I agree that most don't have a personalized image, this has changed over the last couple of years.

My Nickname is not some generic American name like JohnSmith or something. My name is pretty specific. It is also not some short word with a random number attached to it, which is also a sign of a spam profile.

We see that no spammer uses generic names anymore, but they have switched to very specific names. This isn't a good criteria anymore to detect spam.

My post was extremely terse. Spam posts are usually larger & talk about useless stuff, mainly consisting of fillers, instead of content/information. If no link is provided yet, the post may be edited later to include a link. Again, you should've checked that, after waiting and you would've seen, that I'm not editing my post, because I would've forgotten about it in a week, anyway.

Nope, we see a good mixture of short and long spam posts here.

Always assume the best of people, not the worst. -> Last time I asked for support for a game on Steam, someone replied something like "your game version is old, you probably pirated that game", completely ignoring the possibility that I just got the game on a different platform. In this example, I actually got it from GOG, rather than Steam. Yet, the first thing that moron assumed was the worst of me. He didn't even know me. He just saw that version & assumed I pirated a game. What a prick.

I didn't assume anything, I just warned you not to spam.

I can understand where you are coming from, but your post looked like 99% of the spam posts that we get. The first post, no real content, no real question, someone who never posted on the forum whishing a Happy New Year, all this just didn't make sense to me.

So I am watching.

Yeah ! Happy new year to all !