bitcoin trading.

msallen wrote: »

I disagree. Now when the original post is deleted but someone searches for the name of the spamming company, rather than finding nothing here, they find evidence of their "undesirable marketing practises". i.e. a negative result rather than a neutral one.

I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that approach of preserving the spam's name for posterity.

The problem is that most people using search engines do not follow the links to read every corner of the internet where the name comes up... so they would not follow through to this site and find that evidence that the company in question indulged in a bit of junk marketing. But the company might have a mild boost to the total number of search engine hits whenever you put its name in a search bar, due to being mentioned on more web pages. Any publicity is, as they say, good publicity.

In other situations where for example a company shill has set up a thread innocently enquiring about some dangerously risky or outright scam 'investment opportunity'... and a savvy forum user has done some research and provided a scathing commentary on just how risky the offer is and why it carries all the hallmarks of a scam... I'm typically one of the people saying please don't mark it as spam, as it would be a great shame if the thread got deleted because then nobody searching MSE or Google is going to benefit from the research that proved it a likely scam, or would find out what sort of things you can look out for when evaluating if something's legit.

I appreciate this sounds like a double standard but I think the difference is:

1) if something is just blatant spam and quickly eradicated with the spam button, we should not give them the satisfaction of keeping their company name on our community pages, but

2) if something is shown to be a scam or dangerously misleading and we have done some digging and recorded chapter and verse about why the offer is bad, risky, fraudulent etc in a sequence of posts within our community, it is very useful to keep that content 'alive' for people using the Search tools to find and be well warned, rather than us need to be on our guard that it will come around again and either we have to repeat ourselves or risk it not getting shot down so effectively the next time.

Why they will never take off is because they are unregulated, difficult to understand, difficult to use, subject to cyber attacks, and people can lose them all in a split second with no protection whatsoever!