Use placeholder images in suspected-spam comments
Title
Use placeholder images in suspected-spam comments
Short, concise description of the idea
It would be nice to be able to use a placeholder on images that might be spam.
Full description of the idea
Spammers have been using images in comments. Even the setting that lets you have comments from non-friends that have links in them screened does not protect against those images if you aren't using placeholder images. When the images are hosted on the spammer's servers or some other place the spammer has access to stats, the spammer can tell who loaded it and from where, which tells the spammer that some of the spam was effective. This is bad.
When images might be spam, there should be a way for journal owners to use placeholder images, even if they're not otherwise using placeholder images.
If a link in the comment is on an internal anti-spam blacklist, images in the comment should be forced to use placeholders if they're not already.
A setting to use placeholder images with screened comments would work nicely with the setting to screen comments from non-friends that contain links.
An ordered list of benefits
- Less encouragement to spammers that their images are being loaded.
- Fewer users being exposed to spammers' images.
- How do you distinguish between an image that someone wants to see, and an image that likely belongs to a spammer?
- More settings = more problems.
- Would the hassle/dev time be worth it?