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This morning there were six suggested edits waiting in the queue. Three of them were spam:

There has been a big influx of these types of edits lately. They nearly always edit an answer of roughly the same size as the spam that they use to replace it. They always use BBCode style [url=http://example.com]example.com[/url] links and the link is nearly always the last part of the spam. The comment is always an email address and so far it has always been a Gmail address. I have only ever seen these types of edits from anonymous users.

As much as this is helping me get my Steward badge, I'd rather work on approving real suggested edits than rejecting spam by hand.

Is there something that can be done about these automatically?

Here are some more of these from my review history. A lot of them are edits to the same answer:

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
6

I've noticed these over the last month or so - I think (hope) it's just the spam tide coming in and they'll go back out the way they came soon.

The short answer is "Yes, something automated can be done", but it requires a little extra work: If you see that these are from new accounts ping one of the mods and we can nuke the account. Statistics on spam nukes are being collected for future nefarious purposes spam fighting.
(As a bonus destroying the accounts of spammers gives a really, REALLY satisfying feeling! It's like disabling the logon of the EVP of Annoyance you always hated working with when they finally get fired!)

It wouldn't surprise me if SE is also keeping track of spam edit rejections for similar purposes.

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  • In the past 24 hours, I have rejected six spam edits on a single answer: serverfault.com/questions/179229/… There is no account to be reported, because they are all from anonymous users. Is there anything else, which could be done?
    – kasperd
    Commented Aug 2, 2014 at 13:08
  • @kasperd Not really - rejected edits where you use the "spam" reason contribute to the Spam Ram's database and should eventually result in anonymous edits from that IP being blocked.
    – voretaq7 Mod
    Commented Aug 4, 2014 at 16:35

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