Support phone numbers spam

[Deleted User]

 No discussion board and this is as good a place as any because it's directed at MSE 
 

 Why do these posts appear ever day cluttering up the boards?
 It's becoming very annoying and I frequently just leave until they are removed as its impossible to use the forum as there are so many. 

 Dont get why they want or need to post the support numbers for these random apps and software here or anywhere. Surely if anyone needs it they have the box, book, can google the actual website! 

Browntoa

They are promoting fake 3rd party support numbers to rip people off .

The new forum software is meant to deal with the spam .

[Deleted User]

Thank you x 

 well its spam filter aint working. Not much is on this new and supposedly better forum 

fwor

Unfortunately, MSE probably can't win on this one, because if I understand how it works correctly, the spammers don't care if anyone reads their spam thread.

Their sole purpose is to have a thread that survives long enough to be there when Google's, Bing's, etc's indexing bot looks at MSE. The title of their thread then appears as a Google (or whatever) search result when someone searches for "Cash App support number", and the thread title contains the phone number - so it doesn't matter if the user clicks on the link and finds the thread has been removed - the critical bit (the phone number) is in the search result anyway. All the spammers have to do is keep on posting their content, over and over again so that it will get repeatedly picked up by Google et al.

It's hard to counter that, but maybe MSE could try to block phone numbers in thread titles, because there are few legitimate reasons why anyone would want to put a phone number in a thread title?

In the meantime, all we can do is hit the "Report" button and flag it as spam. At least they have cut back the threshold before a post gets "hidden", which seems to help a bit.

[Deleted User]

that explains it thanks x 

ETA
Just spotted theMSE post above re the spam so they're working on it. 

203846930

The comps board uses numbers in the thread titles so putting a filter up for numbers could cause a bit of bother that way but I'm sure that there are repeated words in the spammers titles that could be blocked without hurting any genuine posts.