Advertisement spam via note vandalism - literally happening as you read this

(I'm not sure if this is the place to post such things, or if there's some mod-signal I can shine into the night skies of Gotham, or what, but I'll go with this for now)

Completely by accident, I happened to notice a few minutes ago that post #2020002 had a translation note tucked away in its upper right corner. The content of it read like some 90s-era hentai site advertisement, which made me awfully suspicious.

Checking the note history, I found it was added by user #458770. A little bit of further checking around turned up that:

• He joined just today
• He has been spending the last ~45 minutes or so (as of this writing, which was about 23:50-ish GMT, May 24th) adding these advertisement notes to images
• He's also been changing out image-source links with ad-link-site shortened URLs links (think ad.fly)

This is happening right now. I was going to revert the changes myself, but at the rate he's going, I wonder if it's a script or something, in which case more permanent action from higher up seems more appropriate (and effective).

New joiners can change links straight away?
Frick.

In the future, should we (builders and above) preemptively lock notes for textless images? Only for cases where further non-translation notes (loads of characters, silent gags, math/science formulae, brand name explanations, etc.) wouldn't be necessary, that is.

Also, I thought new users couldn't edit notes without waiting a week first?

NNescio said:

In the future, should we (builders and above) preemptively lock notes for textless images? Only for cases where further non-translation notes (loads of characters, silent gags, math/science formulae, brand name explanations, etc.) wouldn't be necessary, that is.

Also, I thought new users couldn't edit notes without waiting a week first?

Not a bad idea actually.

NNescio said:

In the future, should we (builders and above) preemptively lock notes for textless images? Only for cases where further non-translation notes (loads of characters, silent gags, math/science formulae, brand name explanations, etc.) wouldn't be necessary, that is.

It wouldn't do anything since spambots could just post links in notes on posts that do have text (thus aren't locked) or one of the existing 2 million posts on the site that aren't locked or on the forum or in comments.

We only get a spambot like once every 3 months anyway and they get banned in an hour or two.

NNescio said:

Also, I thought new users couldn't edit notes without waiting a week first?

That only applies to posting comments, flagging posts, and uploading.

I could add it so that members also can't edit notes within their first week, if agreed upon.

Would it really change anything? Note changes can be easily reverted, and if a new user creates an account because he can speak Japanese and wants to fix a translation, or translate a new post but can't, we might lose a potential future translator.

It's only a week and new users should be lurking so they understand the site instead of going in blind and potentially mucking things up.

I can guarantee you that most new users have already been lurking for more than a week before they decide to make an account.

A compromise would be to prevent new users from adding (clickable) URLs to notes, or from changing the source url. Most notes don't require URLs outside of translation notes, and the source url usually doesn't need to be changed.