Question for an Admin

Hello all -

You guys run a great and informative site. I have a question for you. I created a topic in another section, digital photography, and since I posted I am subscribed to that topic. So that any time someone makes a comment, I get an email stating that someone has just made a comment in your thread(love that feature by the way). Anyway over the last two days I have been getting emails that someone made a comment in my post, but it not there. I go to search the post by user, and he/she is not a member on here. Should I be worried?

Thanks,
Hwilensky

Any particular threads that this is happening with? It's possible that posts have been deleted which would explain why you get the email but don't see anything.

I think it was (at least once) one of our Smiley-faced Spammers, as I remember banning and deleting posts (or at least I think I do) from the OP's thread.

Mike is right. It happened several times with the "Smiley Face" annoyance posts. I deleted and banned at least two last night.

Thanks. I was just curious, wanted to be safe that it wasn't a crazy hacker or anything. Thanks for clearing it up guys. Out of curiosity why do they do that?

Hwilensky

Out of curiosity why do they do that?

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They probably have nothing better to do. Very juvenile and quite frankly annoying. But not anything we can't deal with.

Hwilensky said:

Thanks. I was just curious, wanted to be safe that it wasn't a crazy hacker or anything. Thanks for clearing it up guys. Out of curiosity why do they do that?

Hwilensky

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The smiley is hosted on an external web address. So, by leaving the smiley all over the place, it helps build their search engine relevance. By obscuring that URL in a smiley, it makes it more difficult for staff members to notice.