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When dealing with a problematic user, it is beneficial to be able to see if they have behaved badly in general. Especially in the case of spammers, one of the greatest indicators that a post is promotional is if they are making similar posts across multiple sites, however, if other sites have removed the SPAM posts prior to reviewing their post, there is currently no easy way to tell if they are simply a new user who happens to have genuinely felt that a product was helpful to the question or if they are posting a self promoting link.

If diamond moderators were given the ability to see deleted posts on other sites, at least by users who have an account on a site they moderate, it would allow much better understanding of the intent of a user and aid determining if they are a problem user or not.

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    A problem user should be determined by behavior on your site.
    – ɥʇǝS
    Commented Apr 20, 2017 at 15:57
  • @ɥʇǝS - yes, but part of that for spam determination is determining if they are affiliated or not. That determination can be made by a number of mechanisms. Behavior on other sites that shows a pattern of promotion is relevant. To limit abuse, specifically indicating if they had SPAM flags on other sites might be preferable though.
    – AJ Henderson
    Commented Apr 20, 2017 at 16:01
  • What are we doing? The user police? Are you staring at 1 rep users wondering if they are spammers? I really don't understand why this is necessary at all. If another mod tells you they're a spammer from another site, then you know. If they spam your site, then you know. If neither of those happen is it really something we need to be worrying about?
    – ɥʇǝS
    Commented Apr 20, 2017 at 16:04
  • @ɥʇǝS - the particular use case is that I have a promotional post that may or may not be spam. I can't tell if it is a legit user that actually found a product helpful or if it is someone affiliated trying to generate link traffic for SEO and not actually helpful. If they are posting lots of links it becomes obvious, but if you are the last one to get around to removing the links, it is no longer obvious because of the lack of visibility to their already removed posts.
    – AJ Henderson
    Commented Apr 20, 2017 at 16:08
  • Isn't dropping a message in the TL the way to go?
    – rene Mod
    Commented Apr 20, 2017 at 16:57
  • @rene - that's the current alternative, but it's a frequent enough occurance that a quicker more direct solution would be a time saver. It is possible it isn't worth it though, that's why I posted this under "discussion" as well though. I'm not 100% convinced if it would be more good than bad, but wanted to gather ideas and alternatives. Today I had some trouble getting a response, so what could have been a 30 second check became a 20 minute digging session to handle one flag.
    – AJ Henderson
    Commented Apr 20, 2017 at 16:58
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    Assuming you can see the networkprofile, wouldn't a simple indicator that shows how many spam/abusive flags have been raised/marked helpful against that user on a site, maybe within the last 48 hours or so? It just doesn't feel right that a mod needs to access deleted posts on another site just to confirm that a flag raised on their site is valid. Not that I don't trust you guys but this feels like a big leap.
    – rene Mod
    Commented Apr 20, 2017 at 17:08
  • @rene - yeah, I realized that after the initial post and outlined something similar as a possibility in my second answer. This was very much a work in progress posting. (Oops, just realized I didn't update it to include spam flagged post count.)
    – AJ Henderson
    Commented Apr 20, 2017 at 17:09
  • possibly related: Annotate user accounts network-wide when they get rate-limited or banned
    – gnat
    Commented Apr 20, 2017 at 20:15
  • Related: Provide read-only status to moderators on other Stack Exchange sites | Giving moderators “View deleted content” privileges network-wide | Read-only peer-review mode for mods cross-domain
    – Nathaniel is protesting
    Commented Apr 25, 2017 at 15:59

2 Answers 2

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Another possibility for this if the specific content of deleted or posts is a concern would be to simply put a count of deleted (or maybe spam flagged) posts on the network profile. If a user has 5 1 rep accounts with 1+ deleted posts on each, it becomes obvious that they were spamming even without the actual content being available.

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As ɥʇǝS pointed out, there could be some concern about such information biasing a mod for things other than spam. Another possibility would be to simply have a flag indicating if there is spam activity on other sites by the user to help determine affiliation more reliably without the possible other abuses of just expecting them to be a problem because they had lots of low quality (but non-spam) content on another site.

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