I noticed someone with the same link many times in the whenever queue. He may still be there at the time you read this, but /u/MatthewEdward was the guy's name. I haven't gotten around to removing the whenevers at the time I'm writing this. So I thought that was odd, a spammer using the whenever queue. He'd have to fill up his rate limit first. So then I browsed his posts. Yep. He successfully spammed. Folks had downvoted him. A very reasonable and correct thing to do.

But I realized the downside. I had no clue this had happened because of the successful downvoting. Here is the number 1 spam lesson Saidit failed to learn. Removing old spam is more important than removing new spam. The spammers want their links to age. A link that ages is their cheese. And when they get some they will be back to get more. It's more important to remove spam consistently than quickly.

I had gotten a lot of you to volunteer to help remove spam. But then it stopped. Most said they never even saw that bout of spam it was so short lived and we took care of it so fast. But when it stopped I kind of shifted priorites because setting up a way that users can remove content and preventing abuse, it's not impossible, but it isn't easy. So I kind of want to see we have a proper problem before I finish that in lue of getting other things for the site done.

So in the meantime. If you see a spammer, downvote them and mention it. I know that is just passing the nucensce factor. But making sure zero spam links age is pretty critical. We will get spam proportional to the amount of cheese we let them have.