[Borek]

Folks, in the last few months we have a surge of spammers that post simple, yet well worded questions copied verbatim from reddit. They are often quite difficult to spot, and they seem perfectly legit. Two examples from today:

How are excess neutrons formed to create isotopes? I know that one method is through the use of a cyclotron which accelerates a proton and causing a collision with a "target". This would increase the atomic number, Z and create an isotope with 1 less neutron. But how does this method produce an isotope with an excess of neutrons ? For instance Technetium-99 is formed from Mo-99, but how is Mo-99 formed?

I'm a biology undergraduate who took an alternative course route that did not require me to take organic chemistry. However, the subject matter still sounds fascinating to me yet the overarching hatred of the class made me avoid it. This question has already kind of been asked, but none of the answers sufficiently explained what organic chemistry really IS in a scientific light or what makes it so universally challenging. Assume I have an undergraduate level of scientific literacy.

They were posted about three hours ago and are now gone, but you can easily locate them at reddit with google (chances are google cache will retain CF copies for a few days). Actually the one about neutrons was already posted first in October and got some good answers before I realized what was going on so I deleted the spammer account, but left the thread (I prefer to delete everything, to not risk google marking posts as duplicates, it has a negative effect on the search results).

Common mistake of whoever posts these questions is to reuse them in a short period of time. So, if you see a post that looks like a duplicate of one that you have seen in the last few days or weeks, please use the Report to moderator link in the right lower corner of the post to catch mod team attention.

Thank you for all the help you provide by flagging spammy posts, it really helps

[Babcock_Hall]

Why are people spamming us in this way?  Is this just for their amusement, or are they trying to obtain something?  Just curious.

[Borek]

Preparation for a spamdexing. After some time they will add links to signatures or a site to their profile, so that in the future google will see links to whatever they are trying to promote. This is actually quite dated approach, but people still try it.

[hypervalent_iodine]

We had a bunch of these recently over at SFN. They later came back and posted replies that contained spam links.