Either the new "spam" flag reason description is misleading, or I am mislead on what the "spam" flag reason is for

Question

Today I woke up to find an obviously spam meaningless answer that had acccumulated 12 flags. Here's an excerpt:

I like pie. what's your favourite color? mines red. who are you? hi?

This got:

• 5 not an answer flags
• 2 spam flags
• 1 moderator attention flag about quality
• 1 community flag ("low answer quality score")
• 1 very low quality flag

This felt weird, because the obvious thing to do, for me, was to use the spam flag reason on such an obviously worthless spam post!

_{What went in my mind when I saw this post.}

With half as many flags of the right kind, this post would've been dealt with by using the SE patented great Power Flags To The People™ technology! I thought it was time to whip educate my users again on the spam/offensive flags.

Yet, multiple people pointed out that the spam description does not, after all, match this post:

This answer is effectively an advertisement with no disclosure. It is not useful or relevant, but promotional.

Well, this answer was not useful or relevant, but it wasn't promotional either. It was just pure garbage. The "but promotional" part held many users off this reason and prompted them to use the "not an answer"/"very low quality" flags.

Is the spam flag description misleading, or am I mislead on when this flag type should be used?

Answer 1

In my opinion "not an answer" matches this answer perfectly. After all it's ... well, it's not an answer.

Spam has (at least) two (non-food related) meanings:

• any kind of useless content ("he spammed the forum with useless jabbering")
• unsolicited commercial communication

Both are somewhat widely used, but the description of the flag clearly indicates that the second one is more appropriate here.

Answer 2

I am confused. The link to the FAQ draws a distinction between undiscriminated bulk messaging, answers that contain no useful information (eg. "I don't care about your problem") and garbage (eg. "sdfhuiosf").

However, the "source" link goes to a answer by Jeff saying "Please do not cast spam votes against posts unless you honestly believe them to be spam or offensive... And by "spam" I mean it in the strict traditional internet definition [link to wikipedia] not as shorthand for "I don't like this post."" That was in the context of people spam-tagging questions which ruptured SO rules in some way, but were clearly not bulk.

However, to me, garbage "roll the hands on the keyboard or spout nouns at random" posts have much more in common with unsolocited bulk mailings than they do with actual but woefully inadequeate answers. The point being, there's no point educating or disciplining the poster, they're almost certainly posted without any awareness of the community whatsoever, and the only thing to do is delete them.

And even if it only comes up rarely, it would seem sensible for the instructions on the "spam" tag to say "bulk mailing" if that's what it means, and to include, or exclude, garbage to prevent misunderstandings.

Answer 3

If I say that I like pies, I am not promoting a product, or a service. It would be advertisement if I report which brand I prefer.

In the case the answer you reported is written as answer for a question about C++, for example, then it's not an answer.
The description for that flag reports:

It should possibly be an edit, a comment, another question, or deleted altogether.

In the first case, the OP, instead of updating his question, wrote an answer; in the second case, the answer should really be a comment to the question or an answer, if it is asking more information about the question itself or for an answer being asked; in the third case, who wrote the answer is really asking another question, for example:

I have a similar problem, but it happens to me in different cases. What should I do?

In the last case, the answer should be deleted because it's not a comment for the question or for an answer, and it's not even a different question. In this case, there is no need to flag the answer: Once the answer has a negative score, every 20k user can immediately vote to delete the answer; when three users vote to delete it, it will be deleted.

Answer 4

Spam, spam, spam, spam, spam - as invented by the famous Mounty Pythons, is a repeated ad.

Well, most ads are repeated, and therefore, a million repeats without selling something can be called a spam, too.

But a single-nonsense is nonsense, not spam, imho.

Commercial link => Spam
Repeated Garbage => Spam
Garbage => Garbage

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