Wow, they've definitely gone on a spam-killing spree recently. Following that scandal a few weeks back where someone had, uh, "inappropriate" downloads in their checked-in public .bash_history, I did a few searches and found insane amounts of spam in github pages.
It's all gone now, as far as I can tell. You can view the lingering google results with a porn-themed search like "site:github.com pthc"†.
Edit: As a matter of fact, assuming something on that post could link off to something substantial regarding it's subject, should that link even be allowed to stay here?
> assuming something on that post could link off to something substantial regarding it's subject
I don't think that is the case; it's only using the keyword so it can be indexed against it. The links themselves are either self referential or your generic spam links.
I'm looking into why those are showing up in the issues list. Likely a bug. The user has been marked as spammy for over a month, though, which means notifications (email or web) are not delivered.
I wonder if the system to report abuse can be abused.
Can someone report someone's non-spammy gist as abuse and get it removed? Will that person get some sort of notification or warning so that he get a chance to backup the (legitimate, non-spam) gist?
Because if there's a chance that one's valuable gists get deleted without warning, that's a concern.
I have also seen automated accounts being operated by bots similar to those twitter bots who follow you and unfollow you if you don't start following them within specified amount of time.
Actually, 'spam' in the electronic sense is apparently linked to a Monthy Python sketch involving a restraunt where everything contains Spam. From Wikipedia: In the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs, who would repeat "Spam" a huge number of times to scroll other users' text off the screen. In early chat rooms ..., they actually flooded the screen with quotes from the Monty Python Spam sketch.
One could therefore argue that uppercase is the correct presentation.
It's all gone now, as far as I can tell. You can view the lingering google results with a porn-themed search like "site:github.com pthc"†.
Typical cached result: hxxp://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:zLf3TgpkocQJ:byronboxx.github.com/82.html
† that is a child porn-associated acronym. Use common sense deciding how or if you are going to get yourself on the record searching for that.
edit: made the link unclickable due to reasonable concerns expressed below.