When someone does that, especially if a first time post, be suspicious that it might contain spam. If in doubt flag it please.
That was cleaned up by AI, it has developed over a period of time by me. If you go back over the past 5 years you will find several versions of that.
I consider a whole lot of AI responses contain material that humans left online, correct or not, being pick apart by lexing engines.
Seems to me like a decent fella?
Are those fully automated account creating and posting bots?
That's exactly the kind of thing I mean.
Also, short, meaningless replies to old topics where the poster is making their first post, for example:
Cool project!
Thanks, this really helped me!
This is really important, well done!
Hopefully you get the idea.
I'm always suspicious of a new poster if you look at their profile, and the time when they were last seen is only one minute since they last posted.
A low 'read time' and 'topics viewed' doesn't make them look keen either.
What baffles me is if it is not a spammer, what is the purpose of making the post? It adds nothing of value.
Good one Perry!
They make an innocuous seeming post then, when the attention has gone off it, edit it to include their spam. Standard moderator response is to lock it to prevent adding spam later. I sometimes delete the post if it is useless nonsense and send them a warning about posting, well, useless nonsense.
So do we assume that useless nonsense is most likely spam, and there is no other plausible reason for posting useless nonsense, like a misguided attempt to start a conversation, or padding a resumé?
That's tough to answer. There are other indicators (I am deliberately not saying what they are) available to mods that a post could be a precursor to spam. I agree, a nonsense reply could be exactly what you say, but experience as a mod suggests it is likely to be for spam. Locking the reply allows for the possibility that it is benign, the person making it can always make another comment, or can ask the mods why their post has been locked (guess what? They never do).
Akismet just flagged a new topic as spam, hidden in the topic, by setting the text to the same colour as the background, there was indeed spam. Not only that but the OP had also posted something similar in June 2021, so their spam has only just been uncovered.
Here it is: