Are people abusing spam flagging as a cheap way to gain flag weight? [closed]

Question

I just took a look at the list of flags and saw a bunch of spam flags against some user. As it turns out, looking at his profile, pretty much all of his 111 answers that I have peeked at propose using a library that he/she is a part of. However, looking at the questions, they seem on topic to me at least so I don't feel that this is a totally valid flagging. (I may be wrong though)

But I find this disturbing. Ever since I broke the 10k barrier, I'm glad having earned this being able to help keep the site in line. Part of that is regularly checking out the flagged posts and lately, I'm seeing a lot of spam flags, especially for a lot of the older posts.

Now there's a good amount of valid (IMHO) flags on new users who only come in to post some junk and I flag those off and they eventually get taken care of. But I'm also seeing a lot of flags for what appear to be on-topic posts and people are still flagging them just because they can. They're doomed to being flagged off because there are a lot of people being irresponsible not researching these questions before flagging.

Are there any safeguards in place to protect these posts? Pre-10k, I had always thought that the moderators take care of these and as far as I can tell, all of this bypasses them completely. Now I can see why this might be desirable as it means less work for the mods but I find this excessive. Isn't the whole point of flag weight be an indicator of how helpful your flags are to the mods?

Every one of these flags will eventually be free flag weight for the flaggers unless a mod is around to step in since it's pretty much guaranteed to get 5 other flaggers. And there's still ~100 answers from this person alone to potentially be flagged. There is absolutely no moderator intervention whatsoever. The sensible thing to do here would have been to flag for mod attention stating that all his/her posts are potential spam but so far no one seems to have done so yet. So instead, I post here. Is this getting out of hand?

I've earned my flag weight being as helpful as I can. Is this flagging really helping anyone?

I hope I've made my point clear.

Answer 1

To answer the question about the user, yes, he is a spammer. But the problem is that he has had 200+ rep assembled from these spam answers. Spammers which have acquired reputation are always hard to judge and a mod should be informed (what most likely happened with this question). There are corner-cases in which spammers survived because they wrote good spam.

To answer your question about the Spam-Flags, yes I agree that these users should be flagged for Moderator Attention instead together with the suggestion to incinerate the account. Additionally mass-downvotes will most likely be reverted by the almighty Vote-Fraud-Script. Flagging for Moderator Attention is the right way to go here.

There should be a limit of Spam-Flags per flagged and flagging user put into place. Something like:

You've flagged three answers of this user as Spam. If there are more Spam-Answers please flag the user for moderation attention.

Answer 2

It's worth noting that nowhere in any of the recent posts that I looked at has he noted that he's behind the library. The only possible hint is that his name roughly resembles the domain name hosting the library. Given that the majority of answers that he's made exist purely to plug his library, entirely ignoring the answered state and age of each question, there is no doubt that he is a spammer and the posts should be removed.

A possible alternative to moderator action for this particular user would be editing out the link and spammy content from his otherwise moderately useful posts. I dunno about you, but I'm not in the mood to do that, and I'm also not well-versed enough in the realm of iOS animation to judge his answers for good content. That and there are simply too many posts to correct.

I flagged one of his posts for moderator attention about an hour ago, when he first started showing up in the queue.

There was a similar occurrence the other day, only in that case I ended up flagging about two to thee dozen posts as spam, manually. I came back later to find none of the flags approved and both the user and posts nuked. It's very likely that there was a moderator action here, though the nuke was not attributed to anybody. I'm going to assume that there's a Nuke From Orbit button that the moderators have that can simultaneously clean up messes and prevent flag weight abuse. If this superweapon exists, I somehow expect it's going to get triggered here. Duck and cover...

Answer 3

Presumably, you've noticed people flagging spam because you're a 10K plus user and you've got access to mod tools.

Haven't you flagged the user? If so, doesn't that mean the systems working?

Generally if I come across a spam answer, I'll flag it as spam, then have a look at the user. View a few of their other answers (flagging as spam if appropriate), then if it looks like there's a pattern flag one of them for moderator attention, along with a note as to why.

Flag weight is essentially valueless, other than to the user it applies to. I haven't noticed a significant difference between the time for Mods to respond to posts when I had a flag weight of 100 to the time it takes now with a flag weight of around 690. They're generally pretty quick on the easy ones and the edge cases / harder ones to resolve take longer.

It's easy to get a flag weight of 500 (which is the only reward point for flagging). All flag weight represents is how right you are about noticing a post has something wrong with it. So if users are trying to game it, it seems to me that they're just gaming themselves...

Answer 4

It's worth noting that, if you see a user with many spammy answers, it's better (and less work for the moderators) to flag one of the answers with "This user has many spammy answers", rather than flagging every individual answer.

Flag weight notwithstanding.