Darn! Is there no filtering method to send those spammers into orbit as soon as they type out their tripe?

The problem is that it may send a genuine jelly into orbit too. I’ve seen questions where normal jellies unwittedly enclose a link without the intention to spam. Do you want them to get eaten too?

After all a human is a better filter than a computer, so just leave it to the mods.

Excellent point about a frustrating reality.

It’s exactly as @Mimishu1995 says. The problem here is that there are no parameters one could use to filter out all and only spammers. Legitimate users can include web links in their answers and profiles, and spammers sometimes advertise without using web links. Legitimate users sometimes use IPs located in countries where spam typically comes from, and spammers sometimes use IPs located in countries where legitimate users typically come from. Legitimate users can ask about nutritional supplements or skin care, and spammers can ask about recipes or computer problems. As such, spam removal is not something that can be automated at this point in time.

How about making it so “Flag as spam” immediately takes it out of most people’s view, until/unless a moderator marks it as not actually spam?

@Zaku There are sites that do that, and it is abused like crazy. Two words: “politics” and “religion.”

@SavoirFaire Couldn’t you then give moderators the ability to remove spam flag privileges for people who spam-flag non-spam?

@Zaku That’s an interesting proposal. As of right now, it’s not an option built into the site that we can just turn on, so we would have to get some new code added in order to implement it. And I’m not sure how it would interact with the current code (removing questions works differently than removing answers, so it might be harder to implement such a feature for one than it is for the other). It’s worth looking into, though!

If you were going to code something up, I’d add a privilege to any member with x lurve. This privilege would allow the user to put any post into “purgatory” if the post is posted by an account with less than y lurve and the user flags it as spam. The post will remain in “purgatory” until a mod can confirm it’s spam, or decide it’s a legitimate post. People who abuse this privilege can have it revoked.

I would think quick removal of spam would deter some spammers as a waste of their effort.