Colasoft "Spammers"

Question

I have noticed a couple of people on SF that are "spamming" for a company called colasoft. If this was traditional one-liner spam I would be flagging it and moving on with my life.

However there is a reason i put spamming in quotes. Their answers aren't completely off-topic and in most cases the tool could have some use, just in my opinion isn't the first thing to try or in some cases the second, third or fourth thing to try.

John here has been pushing colasoft products in all of his posts. The only reason it got my attention was that a month or so ago there was a user "anna" or somthing like that who did the same thing, just a bit more blatantly. So when I saw a post in the same pattern it twitched a nerve.

Ideas on how to handle this type of situation? Should i just flag it and move on with my life?

Answer 1

Blatant spamming will not be tolerated. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Answer 2

As i commented earlier, and as gs posted , his website IS an ad. blog for Colasoft, and i checked the Colasoft website, you can become a partner and sell their products, the links his providing on his website has the "prid" added which shows his a partner/reseller, however i couldnt find direct linking in his answers, so "technically" his not advertising and he did recommend using Wireshark which is free, so unless the answer isn't related to the question, i don't think it is offensive or spam.

Answer 3

I do wonder about something, though. The product John seems to be pushing is compared a lot of times with Wireshark. Since Wireshark is open-source, it would not surprise me that this company has just misused the Wireshark code behind their own user interface. The fact that the product site is hosted in China makes this even more suspicious to me.

Maybe SO needs to be checked for any references to these products, making sure they're not spam...

Answer 4

The only time I don't flag that sort of thing as spam is when it is actually a really good answer that really solves the questioner's problem. Typically, though, the spamswers are the very thinnest of answer, and if you examine the posting times it's typical that it's a search-and-spam run -- they've found a pile of questions that might be relevant and dumped largely-identical answers into all of them.

Answer 5

Looking at his website I can see direct links to Colasoft (on the right hand side).

I think that most of his answers are of little to no use. They don't contain information but only a link plus a text saying that Capsa is a packet sniffer.

The least he should have done is adding a disclaimer that he's affiliated with Colasoft.

I suggest deleting his answers.