In the past couple of months I'm seeing a lot more spam on Server Fault. Until a few months ago I virtually never saw spam, and now virtually every time I visit there are money lenders, abortion pills, call girls, and all kinds of things that most Server Fault visitors probably don't need.
I find now, when I visit, instead of helping people with technical problems, I spend my time marking these questions as spam and then close the site. I don't help people with technical problems as often. I also visit less often, like many people probably do, because there's fewer interesting problems to solve and more spam.
I know there are / were spam prevention measures in place. Have they failed? Have spammers found their way around them? Is anything being done about it?
Two Suggestions / Feature Requests
- Perhaps users with high reputations could completely remove spam questions from the website based on their single vote, or perhaps two votes instead of five votes.
- Perhaps users with high reputations could report spam more often than once every five seconds. I open the questions in tabs and could report them more quickly than this if the site didn't prevent this.
Here's a screenshot from Server Fault when I visited this afternoon. Eight of the ten questions are spam.
