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I'm seeing a disturbing increase in spam posts promoting personal enhancement products such as male enhancement, hair care, dieting, brain enhancement, and other similar products. The following list (all links 10k only) were some of the more recent I have identified:

These kinds of spam are coming up more often than ever and I have been unable to track them down to any common source. WHOIS and reverse DNS lookups of the domains (via VirusTotal) listed in the spam posts have not found any obvious pattern. Is anyone here able to trace these posts to some common source? How do we better defend against this kind of spam? (We might need a Stack Exchange Community Manager here.)

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    This is a long-standing network-wide issue. Sit tight and have something to bite.
    – John Dvorak
    Commented Jul 3, 2015 at 6:02
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    These aren't bots or infected computers. In most of these posts, a human registers on the site prior to posting.
    – fixer1234
    Commented Jul 4, 2015 at 3:47
  • @fixer1234 The fact that a human created the account or completed the captcha doesn't necessarily mean the machine isn't a bot...
    – Parthian Shot
    Commented Jul 6, 2015 at 16:18
  • Might be worthwhile to expand the list of keywords that automatically flag questions for moderator attention during the hours spam tends to persist longest (i.e. when people are asleep on the east coast).
    – Parthian Shot
    Commented Jul 6, 2015 at 16:20
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    Just keep flagging as spam. Eventually SE's anti-spam systems will learn and start blocking these posts: meta.stackoverflow.com/a/286615/1157054
    – Ajedi32
    Commented Jul 7, 2015 at 16:07
  • Human Verification could be the answer, but is annoying and some bot systems are enough smart to jump that verifications.
    – Francisco Tapia
    Commented Jul 10, 2015 at 17:35
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    This isn't really a problem that is specific to SU, and you can bet that people at SE are looking into options of what can be done to stop spam. SE already blocks a very substantial amount of spam at source and what you see is largely just the tiny amount that manages to slip through. The best you can do is to help out by continuously flagging spam for the system to learn from. It's not just you the spam annoys, but we need to remain open to the majority so that everyone is able to get help when they need it, some spam is the price we pay. Just sit back and get you some processed meat product.
    – Mokubai Mod
    Commented Jul 13, 2015 at 14:49
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    @FranciscoTapia yeah, I hate Captcha, but then Google's new one looks much cleaner.
    – Ian
    Commented Jul 15, 2015 at 11:31

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Obviously I'm biased, but I think Charcoal, especially since the moment autoflagging was enabled, has drastically reduced the impact spam has on the front page of Super User. Most spam of that variety is detected confidently enough to cast four spam flags on it, reducing its score to -4 and pushing the questions off the front page (you can still find them via /questions, and spam answers are only grayed out, not hidden).

Here is a dashboard showing the statistics for Super User over the last three months (this includes less obvious spam, such as promotion of software related to the question at hand).

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