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I noticed a recent spam flag on an answer that led me to the question "Programmatically convert a video to FLV", which had many spam answers (that will probably be deleted by the time you read this). Several of the spammers also targeted a number of other questions that were related to video conversion with their "answers".

Are there other topics on Stack Overflow that draw a disproportionate amount of spam answers? Could we use this information to monitor certain questions as honeypots for product spammers?

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We have protection for this:

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/06/new-protected-question-status/

I have been considering some heuristics for auto-protection, such as "after 3 deleted answers by moderators, auto-protect", or, "after (n)k views, auto protect".

We have also considered making question protection a 20k user rep ability.

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  • Yes, when I see these I usually flag the question to be protected. However, by protecting one question the spammers would move on to another. Since several of the spammers in this question also hit other related questions, I wondered if it might be useful to leave such a question open as a honeypot to allow for easy identification of spammers in certain subject areas. Moderators could identify certain questions to watch, with new answers there getting heavier scrutiny. They might be able to catch spam accounts in the act, rather than relying on serendipity or the new review tools.
    – Brad Larson
    Jan 21, 2011 at 13:43

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