How are questions with titles that differ only in minor words to rude and abusive questions treated?

Question

The Holocaust denial trolling questions https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/36478/is-there-a-way-to-refute-this-image and https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/36450/can-you-refute-this-image have almost identical titles: the most important words "refute" and "image" are shared, while "is there a way to" and "can you" are fairly unimportant words.

The latter question was deleted and given the "This question was marked as spam or rude or abusive and is therefore not shown" mark of shame at Dec 29 '16 at 10:14 Sydney time, while the former question was asked at Dec 30 '16 at 11:05 Sydney time.

Are such questions put into any review queues or detected by Charcoal?

Related post about questions with identical titles: Add title uniqueness to the heuristics for detecting low-quality questions

PS: Stack Exchange, Inc., stop the ongoing Nazi Holocaust denial trolling on Skeptics.SE!

Answer 1

I doubt treating similar titles differently will be effective

How are questions with titles that differ only in minor words to rude and abusive questions treated?

I'm fairly sure the answer to this is: (a) they're not automatically treated in any way, and (b) the community is to self-moderate.

Similarity detection will just lead to workarounds, similar to other cases:

1. "Problem" in titles. When I encountered it, I'd replace the Latin o with the visually identical Greek omicron ο as a workaround. Other people find their own workarounds.

2. CAPTCHA is blocked in China, so I have to find workarounds when it arises. Nowadays, I self-butcher my posts, then after the butchered post is posted, I edit back in the original content.

The trolls will likewise just make the minimum changes to pass the filters, and post anyway.

But what can we do?

PS: Stack Exchange, Inc., stop the ongoing Nazi Holocaust denial trolling on Skeptics.SE!

This is 100% awful. Moreover, generic Holocaust denial is not on topic at Skeptics.SE. The most effective action I've found against this kind of nonsense:

1. flag as "rude and offensive"; and

2. leave a comment like the following (edit to suit the situation [e.g. maybe add a brief explanation that it's a Holocaust denial post] and your writing style):

   Please join me in flagging this as "rude or abusive" to trigger automatic deletion. (The system will automatically delete any post flagged six times as offensive or spam.)

I've used this technique at Islam.SE, and often found I could enlist 5 members of the community to jointly delete a flatly offensive post before a diamond moderator had even seen it. Moreover, it seemed to foster a community spirit: the community fixed the problem as a team! E.g. Shia users take real action against anti-Sunni posts, and vice versa.

I feel it works because:

1. low-rep users don't realize they have the power to act: it only requires 15 rep to flag (i.e., ordinarily two upvotes);
2. low-rep users don't know about automatic deletion, and think they need to wait for a diamond moderator (the comment highlights how Stack Exchange has been designed to empower them); and
3. new users are hesitant to flag due to unfamiliarity ("what if I'm doing the wrong thing?").

In short, it's leadership: showing the community they have a simple way of remedying the problem.

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Copy/paste-able version:

Please join me in flagging this as "rude or abusive" to trigger automatic deletion. ([*The system will automatically delete any post flagged six times as offensive or spam*](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/5221/how-does-deleting-work-what-can-cause-a-post-to-be-deleted-and-what-does-that).)

Answer 2

Its worth remembering that while charcoal is efficient - that well, humans are ingenious.

On its own, both the titles seem innocent, and in theory its possible to ask a fairly innocent question with a similar title. Or practically - unless you knew it was a troll, there's nothing inherently offensive in the title. That's kinda the 'trap'.

Practically - when faced with ambiguity (and presumably the image is the issue here) humans do better. Letting folks know that this is a problem, and having a sufficiently motivated group of folks dealing with it is a start.

CMs could probably assist as needed but that's probably something to be initiated at mod level too.