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See also: How to deal with persistent Spam-Users?

I know of a similar question here, but it does not really answer my question:

How do I deal with users which have just one purpose: Spam?

On Super User, there are 1-rep users which are just posting links to commercial products, and most of the time it's about data- and password-recovery tools. They're human spammers, though, and the answers are always different but always contain the same link. By now I always flag one answer as "Needs moderator attention" and add "spam user" as a comment. Is this sufficient or wrong?

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Flagging is of course the thing to do.

Don't waste downvotes on it, since accounts will get deleted anyway. Do not edit it, unless it’s actively harmful (e.g., links to harmful sites or disturbing content).

And wait for a moderator to take care of it. Not much more to do as a regular user.

If you want to go the extra mile, check other posts from the same user, and make a "site search" on the product name, to find possible other spamming accounts for the same product. Like this, you can even take down a whole gang of it!

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  • 1
    Removing the link sounds very reasonable. I'll do that in the future, thanks.
    – Time Traveling Bobby
    Jun 4, 2010 at 9:30
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    Removing the links isn't necessary. All external links have the rel=nofollow attribute, which tells search engines to not index those links. Editing out product names isn't necessary either, deleted answers can't be seen by search engines.
    – Georg Schölly
    Jun 18, 2010 at 18:56
  • @Georg - what about the product name, then? I'm not really aware fully of how all this works (I guess the SEO proposal could help). Fact of having their product name on the site is visible for Google, still. Is it still a way for them to have more exposure (at least until Google clears them out of the cache, for deleted answers, which can take a while)?
    – Gnoupi
    Jun 18, 2010 at 19:02
  • I don't know if Google even uses words found on websites to modify the pagerank, and if it does, the impact of it is quite small. I don't think there's an advantage of having your product name on this site. (In terms of search engines.) I don't think Google's cache of stackoverflow is old, they are updating their index quite often. (At least for this site.)
    – Georg Schölly
    Jun 18, 2010 at 19:21
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That's absolutely correct -- please flag this spam users for mod attention and indicate "possible spam user" in the comment to the moderator.

We have zero spam tolerance, and trust me, our destroy tool is VERY easy to use and it obliterates all their painstaking manual spam entry work in a matter of seconds. :)

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