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How do I report a suspected spam bot caught making random edit suggestions to other users' posts?

I have seen a lot of this in the past days when reviewing edits, but I'm not certain how to react to it, except of course to reject the edit as vandalism.

I have tried to find some information about this all over SO and Meta but without success.

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    Also if his X numbers of suggested edit is rejected, he gets suggesting edits ban for X days.
    – Himanshu
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 9:31
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    Could you provide an example, perhaps? You could be experiencing review audits (and passing, obviously, since you noticed the bad behaviour).
    – J. Steen
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 9:49

1 Answer 1

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The best way to do it is to flag the post itself that was being vandalized and use the "Other" reason. In the box, explain carefully and briefly what the problem was: That user X was trying to edit spam in. Be careful that you are sure not to suggest the original poster was trying to edit in spam, but that it was someone else. You can include a link to that other user so they can check it out.

You can do this with just one flag by just telling the mod in the "Other" flag that they have been doing this multiple times; the mod will be able to look in the user's edit history to verify.

You didn't ask about this or suggest you were doing it this way, but for posterity's sake: don't use the "Spam" flag on the post for this sort of thing. That does not allow you to indicate any special information, and the mod will believe you were trying to say the original poster had posted spam, which is not correct, and would be declined.

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  • Alright, so I take it that everything flagged as "other" gets more moderator attention?
    – Lundin
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 9:29
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    "More" might not be the correct term, but it does get more 'careful' attention, due to the custom nature of the information it conveys. These flags do tend to be handled a little later than the other flag types (spam and offensive flags are handled very quickly, relatively speaking, for example), but it will be handled specifically and carefully.
    – Andrew Barber
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 9:31
  • @Andrew as far as I know, spam flags are not seen by moderators at all the system depends on having six flags for real spam which will auto delete it.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 9:46
  • @sha it auto deletes after a number of votes, or when a mod checks it. I have seen lots of my spam flags handled by mods.
    – Andrew Barber
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 9:54
  • @Andrew how can you tell it was handled by mod? It's marked "helpful" when the post is deleted, not only manually by a moderator..
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 9:56
  • 'Deleted By' messages; flags handled with my vote the only one (happens to me a lot; notes from mods about the posts; including rejected spam flags.
    – Andrew Barber
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 10:02
  • @sha that last was to you. On mobile...
    – Andrew Barber
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 10:02
  • Well, I don't think moderator handled any of the flags for this specific spammer as it's still alive and even have two spam comments. (I flagged both of course)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 10:18
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    @ShaWizDowArd - Spam and offensive flags leap right to the top of our queue. However, if the community gets 6 flags like this in before we act on them, the posts are auto-deleted and the flags dismissed. I've been pushing for these to hang around in our queue, because we really should be made aware of all content that gets flagged like this. Where there's one instance of spam, there's often others. That spammer you link to is a perfect example of this, because I only saw and destroyed them by browsing a question where they had an auto-deleted post.
    – Brad Larson Mod
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 17:05
  • @Lundin - I tend to review a lot of the "other" flags myself, because they tend to be higher-priority problems and I like the additional information we get from them. In this case, please do flag the post with the spam suggested edit on it, because we now have the ability to review the suggested edit history of a post and see everything that went on there. We can't do much about "anonymous" users, but we can act on people with accounts here.
    – Brad Larson Mod
    Commented Feb 28, 2013 at 17:09

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