@dappled_leaves I haven’t seen a mod complain about this at all in this thread. I provided an answer and @El_Cadejo added a bit to it. As for finding a technical fix, if you know a developer willing to work for free and explain to us (the mod team) how to add it, test it, and fix it if it breaks, let us know. I personally don’t know anything about computer programming. We have one mod that has done some techy stuff for the site. We have limited resources when it comes to the technical stuff, so in order to work with what we have been given, this is what we do.
As I said before, we probably don’t have to do it, but it is something we try to do for the better of Fluther. As @canidmajor showed you, questions do come up on searches. There have been discussions on Fluther before about how Google rates us and how different things hurt us in their rating. So, even behind just what shows up in the searches, we want to do everything we can to help in those situations.
We completely understand that there may be people that don’t know we have requested this, that is why when we see a user doing it a lot, we asked them (privately) not to do it anymore and explain why. As for making it an official rule in the guidelines, that wouldn’t make everyone suddenly know about it either as most people don’t read the guidelines until they are told to or until they want to look to see if something is really there when told they are breaking the guidelines. We have never accused anyone of breaking the guidelines for posting on spam questions, we have only asked them to stop doing it.
I honestly don’t understand why this is a big issue. People are going to do it, we know that. But, if more people make an active decision not to do it because they know we have asked them not to, it will reduce the workload. We know we will never eliminate it all, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to cut it back.