These spammers can usually be identified by some combination of the following features:
- A new user only posts to praise a specific language school or commercial product.
- A new user makes several lightweight "Great post!" comments until they get past the 4-message threshold, and then finally slip in a link to an online English composition class, or whatever.
- Somebody signs up just to post a link to their useless, overpriced language product. We have some self promotion guidelines which say that you can mention your own products only if (a) you're an established member of the forum or (b) you ask the moderators for permission. There's also (c), your product is genuinely worthwhile and interesting in the opinion of the moderators and forum members, but that's a purely subjective judgement. If you see a post advertising a worthless knockoff phone app or an awful language course, please feel free to report it as spam.
If you see any spam in the future, please feel free to use the "!" / "Report" button to let us know about it. We now have a "Ban Hammer" extension just for spammers, which allows us to clean up their mess in just a couple of clicks. Thank you for your help!