A new spam trick

[floris v]

Just came across it on the old forum: an innocent looking post (well, so few people just sign in to say "thank you" that it was just a bit suspicious) with a few hyperlinks with only a space between the a tags. Like <a href="www.visitmysite.com"> </a>.

[Hagar Delest]

Yes, we have had such posts but rather seldom.

When I see such suspicious post, I use to select the whole post to highlight all the strings, including the spaces that appear then.
There are some who set the font to the same color as the background too, in order to keep a text string.

[RoryOF]

I came across one or two such postings, recognised that they were to online streaming sites (football from the site names) and immediately banned the poster and deleted the postings. If I run across obvious spam I delete it immediately and ban the perpetrator - when there is no ambiguity I see no point in cluttering up the Quarantine queue as such postings will not need to be undeleted.
.

[Hagar Delest]

No! Don't delete directly the posts! Even if there is no ambiguity, it had been agreed to never delete any post. The goal is to never be subject to complains and dictatorship by direct deletion. When the posts go to the Quarantine first without direct deletion, it shows that the process has been respected and that Volunteers have had the time to review the mods actions.

[floris v]

I delete them at the old forum, of course. My only concern is that the infrastructure of that forum is so bad, so it's rather hard to warn all mods against spammers up to this kind of trick.