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Is it possible to flag a user rather than just individual posts?

While looking through the Questions today, an odd answer was spotted, that wasn't even an answer. Taking a look at the user's profile, we found it to be a little suspicious, and then realized the website this user had listed on their profile actually led to a trojan. The said user was Website Guru.

Since there's often spam accounts, and users who are like this, why not add the feature to report a user's profile? It would save moderators' time. Instead of flagging multiple posts until the moderators realize this, it could be done in one hit. All it would need would be a little button on the user page.

The flagging option for profiles would of course, be different from questions, possibly containing things like "Spam" or "Malicious content".

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Raising a question here (which you have done) is likely as good as being able to flag a user's profile...Some good examples:

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  • Indeed, however I feel it would be easier to simply have a nice big button where we could flag something as say, "malicious"
    – Simon Sheehan
    Aug 12, 2011 at 1:46
  • @Simon: Please notice that people show their profile to others in some occasions (elections), if this for one or another reason gets implemented it's better to just have a link...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Aug 12, 2011 at 1:51
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  1. Flag the answer, let the moderators know that the user spreads a trojan through a website.

  2. Down vote the answer and find other users that can do the same, it will become gray at the bottom.

  3. The amount of flags shown is manageable, also notice moderators aren't reading flags 24/7.

  4. If you need more immediate action, raising a question or mailing the moderator or SE team works.

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  • I feel this would draw attention better to the actual profile, which is where the issue lies.
    – Simon Sheehan
    Aug 12, 2011 at 1:45
  • @Simon: It would also draw attention to more minor things regarding profiles, which could result in the moderators spending more time. Not to forget that it's would be an underused feature, the SE team might as well just ask you to mail a link instead. We can't have a flag link everywhere...
    – Tamara Wijsman
    Aug 12, 2011 at 1:49
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If the problem is with the user profile, and the URLs showed there, then what you can do is to report in the meta site the problem; flagging a post only works if (of course) the user wrote a post, or a comment.
You could also look for a moderator on chat, and report what you found out; the moderator would take a look to the user profile, and maybe ask you to open a question on the meta to document what has been done, or to let other moderators take a decision too.

As generally there are few cases where the problem is the links shown in a user profile, I think there is no need to implement something such as profile flagging.

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  • If the user didn't post anything, how did you find this malicious profile?
    – Paŭlo Ebermann
    Aug 12, 2011 at 2:52
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    The list of users is available; it could be somebody looks at the users who has not posted, and finds that user profile.
    – apaderno
    Aug 12, 2011 at 3:12
  • the user posted an 'innocent' pointless post.. so we looked at the user profile, which we reported to the mods via chat ;p
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Aug 12, 2011 at 5:08

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