@Background Pony #8B3C
Spam is when bots or people post unsolicited ads, or when someone posts the same comment or post over and over.
I’m sure you’ve seen that background pony posting 5 or 6 emoji on dozens of images, over and over. Sometimes that is considered spam because they’re ‘spamming’ the same comment over and over.
But, we also have instances where someone who doesn’t speak English has created what they consider the perfect English language compliment for their favorite artists and post the same thing repeatedly. It looks like spam, and might seem spammy, but is actually their best attempt to communicate in a language that they don’t know well.
However - if you’re asking more about “What counts as Rule #6”, and less “What is spam?”, please remember Rule #6 isn’t just about spam.
If someone is posting a comment that’s meta to the image it is on, that’s off topic, which is also Rule #6. Or when someone posts a religious screed in the G5 thread - that’s also off topic and so is also “Rule #6”. Or if someone posts a question about an image or comment that got deleted in a thread for discussing politics - that’s also Rule #6.
If you see something that you think is spam, please report it. We get a lot of it and we do what we can to keep it and the spammers off the site, and reports really help - especially with threads that none of us volunteers are subscribed to or read very often.
And if you think something is off topic for a thread, please report it for Rule #6. Someone on staff will look at it and if no one on duty thinks it is off topic then at worse we will just close the report.
If, on the other hand, you saw something that got deleted for Rule #6 and want to know why that comment was Rule #6, you pretty much have to point to the deleted post for us to be able to say why that specific comment or post in that specific thread or on that image was Rule #6. Maybe it was spam. Maybe it was just off topic. It’s hard to speculate without seeing the specifics.