up vote 0 down vote favorite

Right now very few members use the flagging feature. We can use "flag as spam" to clean up the front page. If a question is marked as spam by enough users it will get closed and will not appear on the front page anymore.

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incidentally, not that it makes a huge difference, but I don't think your question warrants a CW tag. – Suresh Venkat♦ Aug 29 '10 at 4:59
I made it CW merely to allow others to modify it, but I guess you are right. – Kaveh♦ Aug 29 '10 at 5:04
I don't think CW matters much here on meta. I mean, we could have all our questions marked as CW, without affecting anything. – Jukka Suomela Aug 29 '10 at 9:29

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up vote 7 down vote accepted

But we don't actually have spam questions. Misguided, badly written, yes, but spam ? I'm not comfortable doing that, because a question that gets closed as spam has serious consequences for the user posing it. I think they get temporarily suspended, and lose 100 rep, and some other things.

Also, flagging sends a message to the moderators. Once we get our own, it might be useful, but not right now.

Update: here's the official statement of what happens when a post is flagged as spam:

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Thanks for the link to the official statement. – Kaveh♦ Aug 29 '10 at 5:03
But we do have some comments that could be flagged as "noise, offensive, or spam". I have seen a couple of comments that could be arguably categorised as "noise", and unfortunately there has been at least one case of "offensive" comments. I think if sufficiently many people flag the same comment, it simply disappears. – Jukka Suomela Aug 29 '10 at 9:34
@Jukka - I'd say any comment that tries to respond to the question or answer is not noise. It's a low bar. – Charles Stewart Aug 29 '10 at 14:32
@Charles: I agree. – Jukka Suomela Aug 29 '10 at 17:14
up vote 2 down vote

Don't do this for questions that should be closed, that is, off-topic, dangerously argumentative, &c. You can flag them "Requires Moderator Attention" if they are worse than usual questions in need of closing. Questions get automatically deleted when they have been flagged spam often enough, which is not the right outcome for such questions: closing or even locking is.

When is a post:

  1. Spam? — When it markets something, be it penis pills or a crackpot politics website;
  2. Noise? — When it consists of endless repetitions of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!". Something that doesn't even try to be a question;
  3. Offensive? — Isn't complexity theory a degenerate, anti-Aryan intellectual activity?
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I think many of turkistany's posts (at least on their first iteration) can be characterized as noise. – Suresh Venkat♦ Aug 29 '10 at 20:37

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