This tag is for questions about suspected user spam, the spam flag or combating spam as a community.

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23
votes
2answers
1k views

What is the exact definition of “spam” for Stack Overflow?

This question deals with denied spam flags. The following example of a low-quality answer with a link to an external site is given in the question: We can find the permutation of a string by ...
22
votes
2answers
682 views

Is self-promotional question tagging allowed? If not, how do you handle it?

Not really sure where to bring this up but I was watching the pending-edit queue and noticed a user by an eponymous handle retrospectively tagging some seemingly contrived questions with the ...
33
votes
1answer
1k views

“Spam” in an actual answer

I just noticed this review audit: http://stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/5450522 And it shows an answer that, on the surface, looks totally reasonable, included below for <10K users. ...
28
votes
2answers
299 views

How is this not spam?

Take a look at these 4 exhibits (images are for benefit of -10k, and are also links to the posts themselves): All 4 posts are absolutely useless, promote some oddly named, dodgy ...
27
votes
1answer
522 views

Is adding company name tags spam/vandalism?

I noticed this morning (UK time) that I'm being asked to review a large number of edits where a user has added the tag "componentone" to anything that currently has the tag "grapecity" and vice versa. ...
33
votes
7answers
1k views

Self-promoting book

I'm a regular answerer (for the async/await questions, at least) on SO. I've recently finished writing a book: O'Reilly's Concurrency in C# Cookbook. As you may guess, a lot of the recipes would ...
17
votes
2answers
1k views

Spam flag disputed but this is overt self-promotion

I flagged this answer as spam and the flag was returned as disputed. I have quoted the answer here: Contact us at Sonatype.com, we have an instance of Nexus that we make available for OSS ...
27
votes
1answer
1k views

Is it OK to edit obvious spam to break links?

I know moderators tend to handle spam flags pretty quickly, so this may not be entirely necessary, but I was wondering if it would be counter productive to break the links in obvious spam posts. I'm ...
22
votes
2answers
1k views

How should I have handled what looked like spam answers?

This guy seems to be regurgitating at-best-sketchy answers to simple questions answered long ago, along with links to his favorite website. After I saw three or four of them I looked at his page and ...
11
votes
1answer
164 views

Should we downvote, flag or leave comments on Spam?

An hour ago we had this (only visible for 10K-ers now) spam post on the site. In a chatroom that post was brought to my attention. When I loaded the post it had a comment and 6 downvotes. I ...
2
votes
1answer
148 views

Review ban for not treating this as “spam or offensive”

After some years of doing edit reviews on SO, I managed to get my first review ban for approving this answer as non-low quality. It popped up as one of them review audits. It may be interesting to ...
1
vote
2answers
94 views

Isn't this answer spam?

My spam flag was rejected on this answer: Magento - Importing Configurable Products It's only promoting an external product. Now I don't know for the next time if I should flag similar spam ...
-25
votes
2answers
174 views

Can I put Adf.ly links in my answers?

Can I use Adf.ly links in my answers to "reward" my work?
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/spam?sort=faq&pagesize=15
meta.stackoverflow.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-35
75482
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:TR4YBPZFJZNKHXYZ6HJAG5Y4L2MBBOP4
<urn:uuid:2e77d533-e387-44f2-921d-59b7abb61dab>
2014-08-31T02:27:07Z
198.252.206.16
sha1:GC4ZFT43M4W7WQ2QS2DQC5C5FNJB5GNT
<urn:uuid:a1bc4ac4-1a31-4b0b-8100-630df293eb3b>
http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/spam?sort=faq&pagesize=15
response
<urn:uuid:05495d49-373e-4dc1-8a5e-fd2a4d0af3dc>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-136-8.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-35
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for August 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf