It's amazing the things you learn when someone points them out to you

Oops, misread that. He was banned on March 25th with posting behaviour reports going back as far as January.

As the rules could be made a lot stricter without forcing me and TobiSD to give up our sigs, I would say that your guess is wrong. For example, they could be changed so that sigs could no longer contain commercial advertisements.

tabzz would be a better example of a (legitimate) user who could be affected by even slightly stricter sig rules.

Of course, if being unable to advertise off-topic businesses hurts a user in any meaningful way, then that user was never legitimate in the first place.

I now understand that a stricter sig policy was actually tried as an anti-spam measure in the past:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...e-html-550222/

Obviously, it didn't work out. What happened?

Yeah we can have a new rule saying Commercial advertisements are not permitted, but you'll have to persuade the root on that and then when I write blogs, I'll be putting all those links on the top of my every post People grudging on my behavior will be reported then

Interesting case, and detailed analysis, good work on that. I would not have caught this because I would assume that it is a typical gibberish post that some users tend to post. I mean, I know of many users that will post something like that, and they're not considered spammers and expect an answer. Something with no punctuation marks, no grammar, no sense ...

It does bring up many issues as a matter of fact, so I'm glad you posted this.

For non-commercial advertising, I'd say that posting a link to your Linux-related website in your sig is acceptable ... or I guess than can change.

I think a URL in your website is acceptable and should even be encouraged, as long as it is non-commercial. This limits a little bit current web-links wich are well-intended but nevertheless commercial. This example was a very good example of something which did not disturb me (I found it useful information despite of the terrible non-informative all positive page), but was nevertheless commercial. It did not annoy me, but if it would be beyond the limit of acceptable policy because it is commercial I would not bother either. That would also exclude a link to RedHat Enterprise, but like it or not that is commercial as well.

Most URLs of serious members are quite useful and I often visit them to see what they think is useful or interesting. We should not forbid that. In Dutch there is a saying: throwing away the child with the bath water. Cannot be translated, but it means throw away something useful because you want to get rid of something in relation with it.

jlinkels

The process outlined in post #7 is actually very close to what we currently do, it's just that we're not as strict about the content contained in .sigs as we are with the content of posts (which is not to say we "allow spam" in them, we don't). Keep in mind that members who are in the "New Member" group can't even have a .sig, which means they have to pass various spam filters and other measures before adding one.

--jeremy

1 members found this post helpful.

"Throwing out the baby with the bathwater" is how we say it in English.

Spambots intentionally post slowly, to avoid detection. Also, if it was indeed a bot then it probably did make thousands of posts per day: just not all to the same forum.

The fact that he edited his posts later on, though, indicates that LQ was a very high priority target.

EDIT: If you google the username, you'll find other forums that he spammed. Depressingly, none of them list him as being banned. The results also contain many threads where it's clear that all of the participants are spambots.