Doubt?

The post just above is a clever example of forum spam.

Whenever you see a bland and generic reply from a newcomer who has not introduced themselves in any other posts, especially if the reply is on an older thread, you should always ask yourself if it's legit. This one is not!

Expand the quote (hit "click to expand") and carefully look at the text - there's a spam/scam hyperlink that's been sneakily added in between other links!

These poor people get paid almost nothing to insert links into web sites, even though this link will never be seen by anyone (except me, because I was looking for it) because it's hidden in between other links, and also invisible near the bottom of a truncated quote. I usually delete these, but this one is educational. I can delete the user without deleting this post, or I can prevent them from posting without approval.

We hope that our experienced members can help to catch this kind of thing. It does require a certain amount of skepticism! This one is not egregious due to its hidden nature, and I'm sure there are many of these (inside quotes) that have never been caught.

In other cases, they make a post that does not contain a link, then they come back later and add a link - those are rarely caught unless I've flagged the post because it just doesn't feel legitimate, so I can check on them later (I would say that my instincts are correct at least 80% of the time on those ones).