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Our current definition of spam focuses mainly on someone trying to sell you an off-site product.

What makes something spam and when should I flag it?

A post should be marked as spam only if it advertises a product, service, or similar and is unsolicited or lacks disclosure.

Might a user's promotion of their own question raise to the level of spam if after posting a question/answer they start to comment this on other user's post:

This really helped understand the answer to your question: [link to the user's answer].

While the link has nothing to do with the question (e.g. clickbait).

Or maybe an outright comment about their post:

Please, someone, please help me, I need an answer ASAP: [link to the user's question]

Can a user's comments raise to the level of being called "spam" as a description in the flag of "something else" if they're linking to an (on-site) source over and over again?

I would reference: Are links to non-commercial endeavors spam? but this answer seems to be talking about off-site promotion.

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Please, someone, please help me, I need an answer ASAP: [link to the user's question]

That's certainly not spam, but it is inappropriate use of comments. If you see that once, just reply with a link to the help center that that isn't an appropriate use of comments, and flag the comment as 'No longer needed'. If you see it happening multiple times, use a custom moderator flag and they can send a more severe warning in the form of a mod message.

This really helped understand the answer to your question: [link to the user's answer].

Again, that's not where comments are for. If the linked post really helps to understand the question/answer better, it should be edited in the question. If the question is actually a duplicate, it should be flagged/closed as such.

Finally, it does happen that a user posts a spam link deliberately in a comment, e.g. to evade spam detection. There is no spam flag for comments (because this is quite rare); just use a custom moderator flag.

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    I've once seen a spam comment on Stack Apps, because that doesn't require reputation to comment. (This also used to be a pervasive problem here on Meta.SE until they added a 5-reputation requirement.) Sep 27, 2019 at 17:20
  • for the second example, I'm really only referring to the user posting "This really helped understand the answer to your question" on several posts but It has nothing to do with the post, it's just there acting kinda like clickbait. Sep 27, 2019 at 17:27
  • From time to time, we do see messages in chat which are similar to the first comment. Those are often considered to be spam/R/A, and are flagged as such.
    – Makyen
    Sep 27, 2019 at 17:52

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