Question found with non-matching answer but some strange links in it

Daniel Ebers

Hi Atlassian Answerers,

although I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask I'll give it a try.

I came across two questions which are interestingly quite precise to Jira & Confluence but bring some suspicious links in it with them.

To my surprise also the first person answering provides suspicious links in the answer - now the interesting thing: the answer does not match the question at all.

Do I miss something very obvious or is there something strange going on?

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Data-Center-discussions/Jira-Software-Data-Center-integration-with-Confluence/td-p/1496601

Cheers,
Daniel

Daniel Eads

You might see posts with weird links from time to time:

Spammers try to sneak these in sometimes, often by posting a legitimate-looking post, and then coming back days later and editing the post to insert their links. Frequently the posts they put up are just silly things like "That worked for me, thanks!" or "Great post" or "glad to be here" etc... but sometimes they'll just copy and paste other content from elsewhere on the site. This second vector leads to strange-looking posts that might defeat even a smarter spam filter than the one we've got, as they use the legit-looking Confluence/Jira keywords.

It's all in vain though, we add the "nofollow" tag to outgoing links, so they could post 100,000 links to their site across Community and it wouldn't affect their Google PageRank value in the slightest. But clearly spammers are not the brightest crayons in the box, so here we are, playing cat-and-mouse and banning these types of posters whenever they appear.

These accounts have been banned and the content spammed, but the next time you see posts like this, feel free to use the "Report to moderators" option from the little '...' menu next to the post and drop a nice "spam!" note in the reason for reporting. Thanks!