True, if a spam post is deleted, there wouldn't be anything to show it had been, just as when spam topics are deleted. Most of the topics i've seen that have been closed though, are in the guest room and so will probably attract the bots more.

there are some forums I've been on where the admins will actually remove any Ot posts by the members as spam, and on those boards things can get fairly draconian sometimes. thankfully nothing of that nature happens here, though I believe the reason boards only go to those sorts of lengths is because of members who do silly things to increase their post count, like writing a post that is nothing but a line of exclamation marks. Luckily nothing like that happens here either ----- it can certainly play merry hell with screen readers.

Exclamations was only one instance. Indeed screen reader settings can help mitigate the problem. For example I have Hal set not to read any punctuation when in continuous document read mode, (which is what I usual use on forums sinse it speeds things up).

but some spammers I've seen have put in things like lines of andom numbers and punctuation, which can be annoying.

I remember one such in nation states, where somebody calling themselves the plop meister wrote posts composed entirely of the word plop repeated many, many times!

A couple of plops might have been amusing, but several hundred, over multiple posts is just irritating.

then, we'll not get into the horrors of lete and screen readers, ----- though on the two occasions when I've encountered people who write properly in Lete(ie, no conventional letters or words at all), they've been reasonable about providing a translation.

but people w0 dust t1nk d01n dis izz c00l can be a pest.

And to prevent myself from sounding like such a person, I mean "People who just think doing this, ie sticking random numbers and other symbols in their posts and using words like n00bs and o0nz makes them sound cool, can be slightly irritating in forums.

Of course though, none of these things apply if everyone, mods and members, are prepared to be reasonable, ----- and thankfully there are many boards around where that happens.

indeed Cx2, though in full lete mode spelling isn't a convention anyway. I believe in full lete mode you'd always use a capital B to represent the last sylable, ----- and I think there are other substitutions for the n and the s as well.

As I said though, people who use propper lete are fairly rare anyway, I only know about it because my brother is rather into that sort of thing.

Hi!
Yes, some topics in the "guestroom" contained a lot of spam (and really, 20 automated messages or more). Not closing these topics would cause more spam by these spambots. If a topic in the guestroom is "interesting" we can move it to the AG discussion room. But please, use the normal discussion list as much as possible. The guest room is for guests who do not want to register at once. I hope we can keep it open for a while...right now it seems to be ok. Scrambling spam urls was one of the best steps.