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I saw the below question pop up. Something with really poor grammar, but at least kinda on-topic for Super User. By the time I clicked through however, the question had been edited into your standard spam faire. I checked the revisions before the spam was cleaned up, and less than a minute had passed between the question being posted and the spam being edited in:

Spam revisions page

I assume they're doing this to avoid some sort of spam block which prevents them from proceeding past the "Ask Question" page. Which makes me wonder if a similar level of protection could be applied to quick edits? I.e, if the OP has 1 rep, and has edited their post substantially within what is normally a 5 minute grace period, subject the edited question to the same level of scrutiny. If it rings any alarms, auto-flag as spam, reject the edit, or at the very least prevent the user from taking any other site action until the situation is handled by human/smokey reviewers?

Not sure if that would just kick the can down the road further, but it might trip up whatever current script they've got and at least slow down the onslaught somewhat.

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    There is an issue to "edited substantially" since that would also trigger if they add a lot of details. Or if we exclude extending a post, then consider translation - if a user posts in a different language than English by accident and wants to edit with the translation, that would still trigger the "substantial changes". Commented Feb 21, 2025 at 13:03
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    I often notice them even before the editing because they tend to just copy a very recent (legit) post. Commented Feb 21, 2025 at 22:58

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We're aware of it - there's a few small tells that generally makes em obvious. They're trying to get around the automated spam filters only... We also have a bunch of manual means dealing with this.

Which doesn't really work as well as the spammers assume. Autoflagging is Charcoal's bailiwick - I can't speak for what they do, or the methods they're using - but I do believe they're aware it happens, and I'm half certain they rescan posts on edits.

We've had manual flagging, and other means to deal with them, and they're a small proportion overall of what we see.

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