Where do these "Private" tags come from?

@Kristin​ 

Thanks for explaining! In other words, it's another bot-run disaster.

                                      hutch48

@hutch48​ This process hides tens of spam messages per day and if they were not hidden, the spam would probably expand to ten times as much.  It is better to be conservative here than to make Sprinklr unsable for everyone.  For example, I just deleted three more spam accounts after only last looking here 30 minutes ago (when I also deleted the same number ... plus there are many more staff members doing the same). 

@Col_Needham​ 

Thank you for replying. I can see the need to identify spam and keep trolls and ignorant attention-seekers at bay, but it seems the innocent are being corralled in with the guilty. What triggers this process? I simply posted an innocuous list of five movies, with no inflammatory language of any kind. How does one protect oneself from being thrown in the drunk tank with the miscreants?

                       hutch48

@hutch48​ 

Can I ask what the purpose of the movie list was?

And was it just text or did you add links to other sites than IMDb?

Also, you state they were set as private, that does not mean they are deleted, IMDb can still see posts marked as "private", it's just regular users who can't then see them before IMDb decides whether to remove the label or not. 

@hutch48​ Any Private post is always visible to staff, and depending upon when a staff member next passes by, it might only be Private for a few minutes anyway.  This is a small inconvenience to pay for all of the protection this approach offers.  If we made exceptions, spammers would figure out how to post things which passed the exception criteria (and remember that Sprinklr is a separate platform with a separate login so there would be security implications in sharing your IMDb account history just to avoid a few minutes of some posts being Private).  Unfortunately like any popular site these days, a huge amount of effort goes into fighting spam, abuse, and automated crawlers -- things that are largely invisible to regular users because, if I say so myself, we do a good job of combating the problem (thanks to a ton of support from Amazon).  Try a search for this topic on your preferred search engine and it sounds like you will be surprised about what you learn.  

@Kristin​ 

It was purely text, responding to an invitation to list your five favourite little-appreciated horror gems to go into a poll. (You might be able to find the original thread by searching for my username, or perhaps "THE SHOUT", which was the top film on my list.)

@Col_Needham​ 

Thank you, Col. This was my first encounter with this anti-spam measure, and I was unaware that a post could be subsequently released from spam jail. It does rather break up the rhythm of a thread, however.

                                        hutch48

@Kristin​ 

The actual thread was titled "Poll Suggestion: IMDb Poll Board's Most Fantastic Little Classical Horror Movie Gems".