Disable (embedding) links on General Discussion

Title.
Section: General Discussion

Pick any thread and you'll notice there's alot of postfarming there. The thread are pretty general for anyone to post in, so I understand we archived Something For All as we're basically discussing nothing at all in those threads. Regardless, also if you pick any thread at all you'll see that there's quite some posts with users advertising stuff. Those links are mostly embedded. For example let's take this thread: How do you make your money?

You'll notice those posts for example:

I use online work. But when I do not have money I take loans from link but always rerurn money in time, because I do not have get bad credit score.

Now I earn $ 3,000 from home. I worked as a driver for $ 1,000 a month, and I worked hard. I didn't like it, so I saved some money . And with a small capital began to trade stocks, at first it was not very good I need cash now to just live, but now things have gone up the hill. Don't be afraid and try something new.

I am student but have some part time work in local bank. I do not much time for college so use help of essayseek.com and will need to get perfect scores of my essay. Also I visit grammar classes on weekends.

Well, I like woodworking and decided to turn out my hobby into a business. For example, epoxy tables are the most common order among my clients. It looks stunning and unique so that it's in trend now. To find out more about it, just read this article woodyexpert.com/best-epoxy-resins

Now I work on industrial factory where producing parts for Air conditioners. In work we use automation toolls like https://eltra-trade.com/catalog/baumer-sensors and other different equipments.

I suggest you do not click those links, God knows what's inside there, but it's quite obvious to me they are trying to advertise something. All of those posts have been edited, so I assume the links were added later in. I'm pretty sure most of the links are different, so censoring them won't help either. I'm not sure if they are spambots or if they have been hacked, but it surely is against the rules.

The section they are most interested in is General Discussion. I've seen a few posting elsewhere, but that seems to be at a bare minimum.

My suggestion is to forbid or disable posting links in the General Discussion section. There's not much (if any) rules for the General Discussion so this would be a great start. Surely we should do something to combat this kind of spam though, because that surely doesn't belong here.

 

I like the idea in theory, but I also think it could confuse a lot of users who were just trying to supply useful information.
I feel like it's relatively unlikely that it's humans doing that, perhaps adding some sort of captcha system when posting a link?
Or, perhaps we could have vast majority of links blocked, but certain ones whitelisted (Sythe, Runescape.com, imgur, RS Wiki, etc.)

 

I like the idea in theory, but I also think it could confuse a lot of users who were just trying to supply useful information.
I feel like it's relatively unlikely that it's humans doing that, perhaps adding some sort of captcha system when posting a link?
Or, perhaps we could have vast majority of links blocked, but certain ones whitelisted (Sythe, Runescape.com, imgur, RS Wiki, etc.)

I agree with whitelisting certain sites.
This would however require dev time and there's already a long list of stuff that needs to be done first.

Perhaps another option is making it against the rules to 'advertise' these type of links/places? If that were to be implemented, we can simply report the post and it will get removed.

Awaiting further discussion before supporting/not supporting.

 

I agree with whitelisting certain sites.
This would however require dev time and there's already a long list of stuff that needs to be done first.

Perhaps another option is making it against the rules to 'advertise' these type of links/places? If that were to be implemented, we can simply report the post and it will get removed.

Awaiting further discussion before supporting/not supporting.

Some sites are blacklisted here, rather than whitelisted but they require either an admin or Matthew/Sythe to implement them. And to do so for every website that's being spammed here, that'd be a fulltime job. As such disable the embedding or posting links entirely would be the best.

 

Some sites are blacklisted here, rather than whitelisted but they require either an admin or Matthew/Sythe to implement them. And to do so for every website that's being spammed here, that'd be a fulltime job. As such disable the embedding or posting links entirely would be the best.

That's blacklisting, that's a lot different.

Whitelisting would be making it so ALL links other than specific ones are blocked.
So the specific ones (Sythe, wiki, etc.) would be allowed, any others would be blocked/not allowed.

 

That's blacklisting, that's a lot different.

Whitelisting would be making it so ALL links other than specific ones are blocked.
So the specific ones (Sythe, wiki, etc.) would be allowed, any others would be blocked/not allowed.

Yeah I’m aware. That’s long, because in some situations linking to offsite stuff is just inevitable. Don’t think Sythe has time to manually add all of those.

 

[Superfluous]

This is an issue in other forums as well. I'm not sure how feasible removing embedded links is on a by-forum basis, but if we do decide to do anything with this we should do the same in Guides as well.

As for support/no support I'm on the fence leaning support. Not too many useful things are posted in market forums as embedded links.

 

This is not something we're looking to implement.

If you see a post that is spam please report it using the post report feature and it will be dealt with.