Weird advertisement in networking forum.

I can't report this in the usual way because it doesn't have any text to display. Therefore no report button. However when you hover a mouse over it, some text does appear and you can see it's an ad. The title is "The menopause marks the end". Get rid of it!

it was already explained somewhere, if I remember well it is already known by the mods, just not yet completely removed.

There's another one! With a different name. In the Laptop Forum!

There have been a lot of these lately. I've probably seen a couple of dozen and reported a fair few.

I think the approach that makes the least work for the mods is to post yourself and report that (although if a mod has a more efficient approach, please tell).

I'd like to know (just out of curiosity) how these work. Where does the mouseover text come from?

Can someone send me a screenshot of this? If you're logged in you should never see an ad of any kind.

--jeremy

Originally Posted by jeremy Can someone send me a screenshot of this? If you're logged in you should never see an ad of any kind. --jeremy

These aren't official advertisements. They are spam posts that advertise stuff. In the past, they were normal posts with text as well as a title and you could report them. Now they don't have visible text any more but if you mouse over the title, text appears. Here's an example.

These will be cleaned up as part of normal moderation, and we're working to better filter them as well.

--jeremy

There's a whole lot more today. I've posted into the threads that didn't have a post and reported them all. I would still like to know, if someone could explain it to me, how you can post without any content and yet content pops up when someone passes a mouse over the title. Where does that content come from?

If I remember well it was originally a "regular" post, but someone reported as spam. Content already deleted, the post itself not yet.

I don't know how it is done either, but I assume that there are good reasons for showing some patience, and letting Jeremy get the problem fixed before pushing to find out.

Then, I'd really like to know.

Also I thought early posts (first post, first few posts?) went through some kind of human inspection, so that doesn't seem to have been 100% either (maybe there has been a massive number of them and we are only seeing a minute percentage that gets through the process).

And then I don't know how anyone profits from this kind of nonsense. Do people really follow these links in spite of the fact that it should be obvious that these are really links to bad things of one sort or another?

Originally Posted by salasi And then I don't know how anyone profits from this kind of nonsense. Do people really follow these links in spite of the fact that it should be obvious that these are really links to bad things of one sort or another?

Spammers and phishers often focus on people dumb enough to follow links or instructions. That is why their methods are dumb or their contents contains errors. Once someone is not smart enough to recognize the bait, the success rate is higher.
The number of members and visitors dumb enough on LQ might be lower than on other forums. Not that we are better than the rest of the world, we are just smarter on this subject and dumber in other aspects.

jlinkels

Originally Posted by salasi And then I don't know how anyone profits from this kind of nonsense. Do people really follow these links in spite of the fact that it should be obvious that these are really links to bad things of one sort or another?

it's in the large numbers - once you have a script that's able to create spam accounts/posts on all sorts of forums, why, you just feed it a list of forums and keep it running. if you get only one click for a hundred posts, and only one person of those who clicked falling for the scam, it's a success. that's why it's called spam.

Originally Posted by salasi Also I thought early posts (first post, first few posts?) went through some kind of human inspection, so that doesn't seem to have been 100% either (maybe there has been a massive number of them and we are only seeing a minute percentage that gets through the process).

The first few posts from a new people goes through a wide range of checks, but a "human inspection" is not one of them (and never has been).

--jeremy