Anti-spam tactics.

[BillButNotBen]

Is there anyway we could do the two following for comments on RPS:

1 - Make links show their actual address rather than allowing people to hide links
2 - Block any comment with a $ sign in it.

It seems like that would get rid of 99% of the recent spam overload.

The first one would particularly help with the recent tactic of copying a lower comment and posting it as a reply higher up -because those ones are actually pretty hard to spot sometimes. besides, I don't think we need the ability to hide link addresses anyway.
The second would stop the recent 'my sister's boyfriend's cousin makes billions online a day' spam which seems to have overloaded half the sites I read. Even if it might be a bit annoying that we'd all have to type our 'dollars' instead.

Alternatively, one of those image picking captchas where we have to pick out the rock, the paper and the shotgun.

[Jams O'Donnell]

Is there some sudden influx of spam I'm not aware of?

[Vicious]

Is there some sudden influx of spam I'm not aware of?

No, it's been pretty much incessant for 18 months.

[Tikey]

Jams, There is a lot of spam in the comments of the main site. The forum's been really quiet spam wise lately.

[Jams O'Donnell]

Ahh -- main site spam. I misunderstood, sorry.

[Velko]

1 - Make links show their actual address rather than allowing people to hide links

The first one would particularly help with the recent tactic of copying a lower comment and posting it as a reply higher up -because those ones are actually pretty hard to spot sometimes.

Yeah, that shit is nasty!

[guitarxe]

I don't understand how bit.ly and sites like that have been able to gain such high popularity from legitimate users. It obscures your link. And usually the first thing you would teach anyone about using the internet is to never click on a link from a stranger without checking where the link goes to.

And no, the argument that it's "better" and "faster" because you don't want ugly long urls in your post doesn't fly because the time it takes to open that site, post your link, get the new link, copy it and paste it in your post is no more than it takes to wrap your link in html tags.

[Nalano]

I don't understand how bit.ly and sites like that have been able to gain such high popularity from legitimate users. It obscures your link. And usually the first thing you would teach anyone about using the internet is to never click on a link from a stranger without checking where the link goes to.

And no, the argument that it's "better" and "faster" because you don't want ugly long urls in your post doesn't fly because the time it takes to open that site, post your link, get the new link, copy it and paste it in your post is no more than it takes to wrap your link in html tags.

SMS and Twitter have character limits that are not friendly to long links. Hence.