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At current, it appears that a spammer is creating multiple accounts to ask very low-quality, off-topic questions on SE.Skeptics. The spammer is also creating more accounts to provide spam answers to their spam questions.

In a situation like this, is it helpful to flag all of the offending posts? Or does issuing a large number of flags just create more work for the moderators?

I ask because it feels odd to flag all of the answers on a question after already flagging the question. I don't know if all of the flags help the system automatically identify the problem, or if they just create more work in the moderator's queue.

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  • You can report it with Smoke Detector if you believe it's vandalism, rude/abusive, or spam. VLQ is typically not the target of Smoke Detector, but it's a suggestion. Commented May 10, 2017 at 2:52
  • Correction @HyperNeutrino: we catch some vandalism as a side effect of some of our offensive post checks, but it shouldn't be manually reported to the bot if you find it. Only spam and offensive posts should be manually reported. Commented May 10, 2017 at 5:30
  • @angussidney Oh okay, alright. Thanks for clarifying that. Commented May 10, 2017 at 5:33

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Absolutely. I'd probably have one of them as a custom flag (or let a mod know via whichever method they prefer) and throw in traditional spam/offensive flags for the rest.

I find these days smoke detector does a good job at nuking spam before we find them. In this case though, it feels like ensuring the moderator knows about it,especially when its clear there's multiple socks is important.

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    Yes, this -- spam flags on all spam posts to speed community deletion, and a custom flag somewhere to let a mod know about whatever pattern you're seeing so that action can be taken on the users if needed. Commented May 10, 2017 at 3:37
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Spam and hate speech flags can automatically delete a post if enough are generated. If the posts are automatically deleted, then the mods don't have to delete the posts themselves. So less work for the mods!

Or at least that's my excuse. Flagging posts I don't like feels good. :)

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