Is Advertising In Your Signature Ok Here?

[elwood_s]

Our newest member's ( youngboy815) signature consists of three links to sites that, judging by their descriptions and URLs, appear to sell knockoff designer handbags. He gives no information whatsoever about himself in his Profile, but may not be a bot since his reply in Worst Mission Type? (his only post) appears to have been written by someone who actually read the question/poll.

Is this sort of thing kosher on OPU?

[BlackBox]

Advertising isn't permitted anywhere on OPU. I've removed the links from his signature and disabled profile editing on the account.

Since he posted something that seems semi-intelligent I just PMed him explaining what happened and that he can stay provided he doesn't violate any other forum rules. If it wasn't for said post he would just get permanently banned like most of the other spammers who seem to find their way here.

If anyone does see any advertising please don't hesitate to use the "report" button at the top right of each post (it will email all of the mods and admins with a link to the post). What you shouldn't do when reporting advertising is reply to the post or otherwise call them out on being a spammer (it just creates more mess for the mods to clean up).

Thanks for the heads-up.

[Sirbomber]

Define "advertising" please?  Do we only care about "commercial" advertisement, or should we also get rid of "PLZ CHEK OWT MY FUROM" links?

[BlackBox]

Commercial advertising is an obvious no. (especially with the bots we have been getting, they are all scams / fake products anyway). That's just an abuse of OPU to try to drive traffic for commercial purposes (it can also negatively affect our position in search results, if we have links on our site to scam websites, or websites that have no content and are just meant to try to boost search engine rank (doorway pages and the like)).

Links to personal forums/whatever where you aren't trying to make money... well I guess I don't really see a problem with this, so long as the idea isn't to divert traffic from OPU. I don't really see a problem with something insignificant like in a signature or whatever, but not posts specifically to promote said website. That being said I don't think posts where legitimate technical issues are being asked (good example being op2rules asking us to try to perform some security tests on his website) are really an issue at all. Basically so long as it's not simply a blatant advertisement for a website as opposed to having a question answered about it. I think there is a lot of grey area as to what defines "blatant advertising" here and will probably have to be handled on a case to case basis.

The only exceptions I can think of off the top of my head would be personal website posting/whatever in the wrong forum (general and test forum exist for these purposes), or OP2 forums of some sort (which falls into the "diverting traffic away from OPU" realm; if people want to encourage discussion about the game they might as well point people in our direction).

[alice]

'youngboy815', who posted in http://forum.outpost2.net/index.php?showtopic=4895, is likely a bot; they just reposted the last line of text that Sirbomber posted in reply to the original poster: "Anyways, mining missions are terrible." Their username convention follows the same as many of the bots that I've been receiving on my forum.

[Flashy]

Well, looks like they get more intelligent, it is the first bot that chose something different than Outpost 1 as its favourite op game

[CK9]

If it wasn't for said post he would just get permanently
banned like most of the other spammers who seem to find their way here.

you forgot another condition of that: if it wasn't you instead of me who responded to this.

Flashy, I think it's just a case of telling the bot to sellect the first option under the default.  Seeing as tthere are only 2 options, it's hard to know exactly, though.

[BlackBox]

Well, we'll probably have to end up making the captcha a bit more robust. I think that a lot of these bots may be actual people registering and just pasting. The registration form is modified slightly from what the original forum software used (I can't imagine that people are modifying their bots to deal with the modified form; it's probably just someone hand registering it and then spamming with it).

Then again, if people are hand registering for spamming purposes any captcha used is useless.

[elwood_s]

'youngboy815', who posted in http://forum.outpost2.net/index.php?showtopic=4895, is likely a bot; they just reposted the last line of text that Sirbomber posted in reply to the original poster: "Anyways, mining missions are terrible." ...

That was a great catch.  Sirbomber's post is four months old.  I'd have never thought to look back that far.  

If it is a bot, I have to agree with Flashy; they are getting smarter.

[CK9]

Then there is the possibility that it is an actual person who was reiterating a point...remote possibility...