User spamming - intentional or not?

Question

I feel that a user is asking questions without the purpose of gaining an answer, but to rather link to several other sites. Multiple links in almost all of his / her questions with less then half of them with accepted answers.

I can't tell if he's simply being a good user with lots of links in his questions or someone who's asking lots of questions trying to increase site traffic.

Links:

From Lazarus Form Recovery for Safari?

I use Lazarus a lot on Chrome and FireFox. Well, not a lot, but it's great for crashing when you're writing something online in a form that doesn't automatically save what you're writing. Plus, this should be default in every browser ANYway, and not built-in any web site (such as gmail).

So, is there any such option for Safari? Does Saft do that? Just by looking at the home page, it seems to me like bloatware to Safari 4.

From Configuring 2 disks to run at same time on Time Machine

Ok, so rotating two disks with Time Machine is rather simple. Probably simpler than using 3rd part to do backups (from this worth reading FAQ about TM) of it.

I actually like to keep half my macbook's disk for TM and I want to add an external disk.

Problem is: I can only choose one to backup on TM's settings.

One possible solution is setting up TM to a RAID, but I'm not sure this is a good idea, and I believe it would require both disks (or partitions) being the same size.

Currently I think it's better to just manually rotate, by going to settings and changing the selected disk daily, or whatever frequency.

I think the question here is: how can I do this automatically?

And more:

https://superuser.com/questions/109885/instant-email-alerts-and-notifications-closed

https://superuser.com/questions/110197/new-macbooks-touchpad-customizing-middle-clicks-and-few-swipe-actions-natively

Keeping Mac OSX up and sleepless while task / app is running

How could I safely fix my walking "dead pixel" bug?

Backup Gmail using Mail.app and IMAP without redundancy

Real-Time chat translation on mac using either Skype, Adium or iChat

https://superuser.com/questions/116292/wheres-my-free-space-gone-on-my-mac-closed

How to merge (and not replace) folders when copying on the Mac?

Old (Leopard) Expose on Snow Leopard (for mac)

https://superuser.com/questions/118463/no-reason-to-be-unable-to-mount-dmg-from-tuneup-and-no-errors-given-on-mac

DMG mounting warning message says "it may make computer less secure or cause other problems"

Again, some of these look like legitimate questions, but for the most part it looks like a lot of links to other forums and boards, applications, and developer sites.

Answer 1

Multiple links in almost all of his / her questions with less then half of them with accepted answers.

I can't tell if he's simply being a good user with lots of links in his questions or someone who's asking lots of questions trying to increase site traffic.

Multiple links always to the same website or to different ones? In the former case it's probably spam, in the latter case he's just a linky person (yay I made up a new word)

EDIT: saw the links, come up how can that be spam? Do you think he owns all of those websites?

Answer 2

If you think it's spam, flag it as spam and the post will be automatically deleted (and the user will be hit with -100 to reputation) if five other users agree.

If you aren't sure, you can always flag anything for moderator attention.

Answer 3

Doesn't look like spam according to the regular definition of spam. If we have spammers that are so clever as to actually ask useful and interesting questions in order to provide links, then by definition it's no longer spam.

In other words, as long as the content is topical and informative, the user's intentions are completely irrelevant.

Contrast: Users who genuinely want help but ask for it in such a disjointed and ungrammatical way as to be incomprehensible have their questions closed. We don't care whether they were trying to be coherent or not, all that matters is that they were incoherent. The same applies in reverse.

Answer 4

I don't see anything spammy about those links the majority seem to be pointing back to other similar, but not quite related enough questions. The next highest number are support forums for well known vendors that have no need to have someone spam for them (roxio and apple off the top of my head)

Also his listed website doesn't strike me as a spammer's at all.

To me it seems like someone who has done their research, gotten stuck, and included links to what they have already found.

Answer 5

That is totally unacceptable behaviour. It would be like posting links to Unicorns in totally non-Unicorn related answers.

It would be even worse if he used image links:

Seriously though, if there's a pattern, I would vote to close as Spam and maybe flag for moderator attention. If you're unsure, a question on Meta with links will give you feedback from the community, plus usually a moderator or two will see the issue straight away.