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As of today, the Ask Ubuntu site was hit with a flood of spam. While I was trying to flag these posts, I was informed that I could only raise 16 flags a day. I would question this constraint.

Do we have any means to contact a moderator or a special instance to remove this spam? Or could we install one?

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    Make SE listen to the mods and change its current direction, so that the strike will end. Profit. :)
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 8:19
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    meta.askubuntu.com/questions/20339/… related
    – Journeyman Geek Mod
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 8:19
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    There is an AU Meta post which addresses the effects of the current strike on AU: meta.askubuntu.com/q/20325/57576
    – andrew.46
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 8:26
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    Looks like most of them are already deleted. If the problem is too large maybe directly contacting the site staff is possible. Have a look here. I don't know how frequently they check or react to this though. It looks like this might be mainly for contacting SE with problems with your own account
    – user13267
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 8:34
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    I was concerned about the spam posts... I kept flagging and lost hopes on the company.... and I joined the strike.
    – Random Person
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 8:35
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    Yes, there's a reason why you almost never saw any of this spam before. It wasn't because it wasn't getting posted.
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 8:43
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    Oli, AU mod, didn't join the strike. Maybe reach out to them.
    – Random Person
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 8:47
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    Regarding number of times you can flag posts in a day, refer the last section in this article: meta.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/flag-posts
    – Random Person
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 8:50
  • I don't get why this is tagged feature request when it's not requesting any feature in particular. could you explain? Or did you mean to tag discussion?
    – starball
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 18:43
  • The feature they're requesting is faster spam handling, @starball, as it says in the title. It's not a fully fleshed-out feature request with any concrete proposal, but they very clearly end the question with "could we install [any means to contact a moderator or a special instance to remove this spam, beyond flags, which have a daily limit]?"
    – Cody Gray
    Commented Jun 22, 2023 at 0:41
  • Yes, thanks. Didn't know a strike was going on here as well.
    – kanehekili
    Commented Jun 22, 2023 at 11:11

1 Answer 1

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Tl;dr a decent portion of the community of spam fighters went on strike.

Expanded answer
We have extremely good community spam protection. Or, we used to. Normally, there’s a number of tools used to fight spam and get it flagged very quickly 24/7. This means most spam gets deleted extremely quickly.

A number of users (myself included) object to recent actions by SE and are now on strike. As such, when the subset of the community dedicated to fighting spam stops fighting spam, there will be more spam visible. That is ... kinda the point. People notice when less moderation means more garbage (spam). Notably, the strike includes the primary system used for spam fighting.

If SE agrees to the requirements to end the strike, you’ll see less spam. If you’d like to support the strike, consider joining the strike.

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    Well, this might take a long time until strike is over. Guess the actual question here is what to do in the meanwhile. Quick answer is "nothing", and having the sites full with spam will hopefully convince SE to listen better, so I'm kind of expecting it.
    – Shadow Wizard
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 8:44
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    @Shadow Wizard Strikes Back: It is still very indirect. If Stack Overflow (and by extension other sites) is viewed by the company as a help desk (ticket system) where unpaid volunteers are carrying out work orders then spam is only a minor annoyance. It certainly keeps the numbers up (with or without spam).
    – This_is_NOT_a_forum
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 11:30
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    From the looks of it, spam is engagement as far as SE is concerned. The plan seems to be to let people sign up and post whatever so the numbers look good, then deploy a bunch of tone deaf gen AI hype features to help convince investors that they're cutting edge.
    – ggorlen
    Commented Jun 21, 2023 at 15:49

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