How not to be "spammy"?
Sorry, your comment looks too much like spam. Please try to be a little less spammy.
I've just tried to answer a post, and I got this message saying that I am being too "spammy", but I just wrote a grammatical explanation.
Does anyone know anything about the spam algorithm, so I can avoid being spammy?
7 Answers
Ok, I've just managed to post that "spammy" message right here. All I had to do was to add bullet points, which were missing in the original one (it was just one line below the other). The message was:
There is no tense called subjunctive. Subjunctive is a mood, like indicative, and there are many tenses for each mood.
indicative
- present indicative
- present perfect indicative
- imperfect indicative
- preterite indicative
- pluperfect indicative
- future indicative
- future perfect indicative
- conditional indicative
- conditional perfect indicative
subjunctive
- present subjunctive
- present perfect subjunctive
- imperfect subjunctive
- pluperfect subjunctive
- future subjunctive
- future perfect subjunctive
Look at the answer? I couldn't write my answer; I had to save it on a word document. This is the link.
First line of what I wrote:
There is no tense called subjunctive. Subjunctive is a mood, like indicative, and there are many tenses for each mood.
Second line of what I wrote:
indicative
Third line of what I wrote:
present indicative
Shall I continue?
We use a popular spam filter called Akismet, and, unfortunately, I don't know exactly how it works. They don't really publicize that -- if they did, actual spammers would find it a lot easier to game the system.
Their FAQ isn't very helpful:
How does it work?
When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your site it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.
What stops the system from being gamed?
Well without giving too much of the secret sauce away, we can safely say that it would be pretty difficult to poison Akismet. We use dozens of factors to determine the spamminess of a submission, and we also have an identity attached to everyone using and contributing to the system, which allows us to do some interesting things with weighting and clustering activity.
There are certainly ways we could handle spam a little better. For now, though, I can't be of much help, I'm afraid. :(
EDIT: The spam filter is no longer checking posts by users with at least 30 reputation. See here.
It happened to me a few days ago when I made a post with 4 links in it (all to pages on SpanishDict.com). I thought the links might be triggering the spam filter, so I divided the msg. into two, with two links in each, and they both posted with no problem. I submitted a Feedback comment about it.
I think I was able to post one last night with 3 or 4 links in it, and those were to other sites, if I remember correctly.
Sorry, I misunderstood your post. I thought you had provided an answer and was then accused of being spammy.
When I answered your PM the other day, I just wrote my email address in the note, nothing else. That tripped the spam filter, so I know it looks for links and email addresses.
I had to add some drivel to avoid the filter.
It may help if you could point out the thread so we could look at your answer. After all, this just looks like one person's opinion.
