Is there value in reporting spam messages to the moderator?

[markwilkins]

I often click the "report to moderator" button on messages that clearly seem to be generated by some kind of bot or similar. For example, there were two messages today (about 5 minutes apart) on the General Synthesis / Off Topic forum by a "holeedible". They are the first two messages by this "user", and they contain no useful content. One was a response to an 8 year old post. Each of them had a URL inserted into the quoted text. I don't know what the point of that is - perhaps some kind of attempt to affect SEO rankings in some way. I have no idea.

In any case, I am wondering if my "report to moderator" actions are of any use. Or is it just annoying the moderator? I honestly don't want to be bugging someone needlessly. But if it is useful, I can continue getting my tiny dopamine rush by reporting these scofflaws. I do remember checking back a few days after reporting one of them, and the message was still there ... but maybe the user was deleted? Or maybe my report was ignored. In any case, if the moderator or someone in the know can let me know if there is value or not, I can adjust/continue my behavior as appropriate.

[This message generated by a grumpy old man who is definitely annoyed by some of the new technology but ... who is seeing at least a 3x speedup in lines of code written and functionality produced by the grumpy man with the aid of the AI revolution. But that is a different topic for a different forum.]

Mark

[gus]

It helps!

I try and go through every few days to ban the ai bots, but it does seem a little hopeless these days. I tried making the security questions more nuanced (ie: go to an external link and bring back X info from there) but doesn't seem to help at all.

[markwilkins]

Thanks. It probably is a losing battle. But we humans will valiantly struggle on! Or at least until the bots kick us out.

Mark