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Usually we need to share some links so that our question is more clear. For example posting a link to the tutorial being followed or just linking to other questions in Stack Overflow.

There may be a link that leads to malicious or spam websites (though I haven’t seen one yet).

  1. How does Stack Overflow handle these links?

  2. Can we report malicious links?

I have read How to deal with potentially malicious or rather useless links in a question? [duplicate] and it's helpful, but doesn't address any mechanism that Stack Overflow has for prevention of such links.

5
  • 3
    Malicious links are rare, spam links can be reported as spam. Stackoverflow itself doesn't check these links, it's quite complicated to do that properly.
    – Mast
    Aug 22, 2020 at 12:09
  • 36
    some valid links change to malicious with time. Don't downvote good answers just because of the link. Just edit it out. Aug 23, 2020 at 11:32
  • 2
    @lxg No, it doesn’t answer my question. There we cannot find information about how Stackoverflow deals with such links as well as how to report them Aug 24, 2020 at 18:16
  • Well finding and report are done manually on Meta like mine, where a old tutorial web site lost it's domain he was remplaced by either NSFW or fake Ads ans fake support content. And the mass editing will be manual too. that's why im waiting to get to 2K before scripting the clean up. Aug 25, 2020 at 9:13
  • 2
    SO does have a blacklist of domains that can't be used in posts, and that includes many link-shorteners, since they're sometimes used to conceal a malicious end-destination, or for creating backlinks to boost SEO and traffic.
    – smci
    Oct 28, 2020 at 20:10

1 Answer 1

54

No, we don't have automated systems to detect malicious links. Stack Overflow handles these links—and other problematic content—via community review. If you see a malicious link, you can and should suggest an edit removing it. Either remove the link altogether, or, if it's a once-legitimate link that has rotted, replace it with a Wayback Machine link.

You will probably also want to flag the question as "needs improvement", since questions cannot rely on content hidden behind external links. All of the relevant information must be included in the question itself. Whenever the code in a question is hidden behind an external link, use: flag → needs improvement → a community-specific reason → needs debugging details.

Alternatively, if the post is really just spam, then you can and should flag it as such directly. Do not edit spam!

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  • You should note that these improvement flags really do nothing since the close vote review queue item ages away
    – user12867493
    Aug 22, 2020 at 13:25
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    Note that we regularly get flags for older posts where a link has gone stale, as 'spam', because the link has since been taken over by a name squatter. Please don't flag posts as spam just because a site they link to no longer publishes what it used to publish.
    – Martijn Pieters Mod
    Aug 22, 2020 at 13:37
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    I'm always surprised how little obvious spam content there is on SO. I hope the mods would get support by some automated tools there (for example auto-flagging content that fullfills certain criteria). But without such systems, keeping the site clean seems even more impressive. Aug 23, 2020 at 9:57
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    @Trilarion Charcoal does that, doesn't it? Aug 23, 2020 at 10:48
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    @Trilarion there are multiple systems in place; Stack Overflow has the SpamRam system, and the community has Charcoal to deal with stuff that got past SpamRam. And we have loads of diligent members with flagging rights that find the remainder.
    – Martijn Pieters Mod
    Aug 23, 2020 at 11:13
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    "because the link has since been taken over by a name squatter." Instead, be a good citizen and link to an Internet Archive version if one exists.
    – Michael
    Aug 24, 2020 at 0:33
  • 2
    The most common "spam" that I regularly notice on SO is users promoting their own tools and companies without properly acknowledging it. It is sometimes so subtle, that it is hard to discern without searching and seeing the pattern of posts.
    – Boaz
    Aug 24, 2020 at 9:30
  • 1
    @Boaz. Calling that spam when so subtle as you say is borderline. Yes, they should declare their interest but the question is that is the answer given valid? I don't think such is spam from your description (weight on subtlety)
    – Dayo
    Aug 24, 2020 at 10:27
  • @Dayo I agree, hence the double quotes around the term.
    – Boaz
    Aug 24, 2020 at 10:27
  • Are you sure we are supposed to edit it? That's how we get weird declined flags due to reviewers not understanding that the original post/link was spam. I always thought you leave them alone and flag them hard.
    – zero298
    Aug 24, 2020 at 14:00
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    @zero298 If the situation isn't obviously clear, then you should be using a custom moderator flag and explaining the issue. Don't expect moderators to spend 5 or 10 minutes investigating each and every "spam", "R/A", "NAA", and "VLQ" flag. We just can't spend that kind of time on every such flag. If it's not clear and obviously the time of thing that you're thinking of using a named flag type for, then use a custom flag and explain, with as much detail as you have/can. If you've already done research, don't make us do it all over again.
    – Makyen Mod
    Aug 24, 2020 at 20:36

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