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I've seen plenty of posts about flagging spammy questions, but now it seems to be mutating to profile spam. Not that much of a problem, but there don't seem to be any moderation tools for this on the site.
Am I wrong?
Example: https://stackoverflow.com/users/668788/petcarerx-discount-code
Actually, why bother? If that user does not contribute any content, no one will ever see their profile (except for you linking it here, that is).
This site is about the information, not the people. It sounds so trite when quoted so much, but it is really true. That user spent a bit of time creating the account and it will amount to exactly nothing.
This entire site is about what people do, not about who they are. If the spammer posted a few questions or answers, I would say "flag one of their posts." But they did not post anything — they did not contribute anything to the site — therefore, for all practical purposes, they do not exist.
I'm not saying the account should not be deleted. I am saying that the effect is so negligible to non-existent, it does not warrant adding a "feature" to fix a virtually non-existent problem. You can always write [email protected] to rid the system of this type of noise.
"Spam" problem solved.
You should simply flag problematic content.
If that problematic content often rolls up to a particular user, believe me, we'll take note of that.
If, as in the case you specified, the user has no content to flag then yes that is more difficult. Shoot us a quick email -- click the "contact us" link at the bottom of every page.
The profile links are nofollowed (except for users with sufficient rep), so in theory they don't get any SEO benefit.
If you find a reason why they are making your experience on stackoverflow worse, you can deal with them by emailing team at stackoverflow, or flagging one of your own posts and putting the info in there.
Or, in the egregious case, flag one of their answers/questions and note to the mod that the user's profile is somehow not consistent with the site's policies.
A feature like this would have helped with my question about a user doing spammy edits, though I'm not convinced (yet) that it'd be useful often enough to qualify it for a full-on feature addition. The workarounds suggested in my question (email mod, flag a post and write a note to the mod) would apply here as well.
As this has been declined, let me say that I'd be more than happy to banninate. Flag anything and leave a link to the user's account explaining.
