Auto-delete/destroy 1 rep user when their post is deleted as spam

I'm not sure that I'd want this account auto-deletion, because it might make hunting down other spammers a little harder. (See my update below.)

On Stack Overflow, we often get clusters of spam accounts from the same location, so my usual spammer workflow is to delete the spam post, then pull up the account information for the spammer. If they have other spam answers, I deal with them as well, but I make sure to read each of the answers to avoid removing a legitimate answer inadvertently.

Finally, I use their account as a launching-off point and examine others that have shared a location with this one. This has helped me track down rings of spammers that somehow slipped through the cracks (or were upvoted during our recent /review shenanigans). If the account had been auto-deleted, I would not have been able to perform this kind of investigation. Only when all spammers from that location have been dealt with do I destroy the account(s).

This might be unique to Stack Overflow, given our traffic (and thus spam) volume, but I think the auto-deletion of spammers might hurt us more than it helps. In fact, as a moderator, I might appreciate if the spam flags would hang around even after a post was automatically deleted by a pile of community spam flags. This would point our attention to these users, rather than having their posts be silently deleted.

Update (Sept. 23, 2015): In the time since I wrote the above, we have been given tools to find other accounts at the same location as deleted accounts, so that part of my argument no longer holds. Also, the anti-spam system now does a good job of immediately halting posts from a location hosting identified spammers, which greatly reduces the frequency of repeat spammers from the same location.

After seeing how this has changed my workflow, I now support the automatic deletion of accounts whose only posts were all destroyed via 6 community spam flags or one hard moderator spam flag. I don't see a great reason for keeping those around any longer, and this destruction could save us some time.

I think that an important part of spam prevention consists of two parts:

1. Making spamming more time consuming for the spammer. If it takes more time, it's worth less money.
2. Making treatment trivial and swift.

I think that if a user is

• Very new (1 week or less)
• Has no positive contribution (no upvoted posts)
• Has his posts flagged as spam six times

We can be pretty confident that the user is a spammer and we want him gone ASAP. Since moderators can now see the last IP address from which deleted and destroyed users come from, an automatic flag about a user being destroyed by spam, along with a possible link to the relevant investigation pages mods have will seriously ease up the detection and removal of spammers.

As of now, if a spam post gets deleted by spam, there's no indication about it to the mods, which makes it all the harder to detect and treat. In 3 years I've been participating in SE, I can probably count the number of times I've seen anyone getting hit by the -100 penalty on one hand. It's ineffective and not deterring at all.

Update: I now support automatically deleting users whose only participation was deleted by rude/spam flags. SpamRam has gotten better and trolls worse since I wrote this answer.

I agree with the argument in this answer that auto-deletion would impede investigation of some cases. I've kept spammer accounts around for a few minutes (or even a few hours) while I investigate something, so this is not unique to SO.

What would help me, though, is if community-deleted spam automatically raised a moderator flag so we can clean up the user. Sometimes spam is deleted without mod intervention (good! the tools work and the community helps!), and unless mods come across it in our normal use of the site or someone points it out, we'll never notice and the account will hang around. An auto-flag against one of the user's deleted spam posts, optionally with a one-click option for "destroy user as spammer", would help mods clean up after them efficiently. The "destroy user as spammer" option shouldn't be presented if the user has rep or upvoted posts, but the flag would still tell mods to take a closer look.

Even if the "destroy user as spammer" button isn't feasible, I'm willing to click through to destroy the user -- the auto-flag still helps here.

I was about to post a feature-request a few months ago when I first saw this. Here are my original thoughts:

If the user meets all of the following criteria, destroy it automatically:

• The user has only 1 reputation (so those with the association bonus would be exempt from this)
• The user has at least one post deleted as spam (exclude rude/abusive if possible)
• The user is no older than 1 week when the first spam deletion occurs
• It's been another week since the spam post was deleted and the user has no visible activities
• The user has no other visible posts

I'll explain the last two points of my idea.

One week after spam post deletion

This is to assure that a real user isn't accidentally deleted as spammer, though re-creating an account shouldn't be a big problem if the user sincerely wants to participate in Stack Exchange. In (almost) all cases, a spammer will never re-use an account. He will simply proceed with creating more accounts. A potentially real user should know his fault and never do that again, and probably add another post after learning the basic rules here.

No other visible posts

(Though I think this could be obvious.) If a post is visible, it means that the community accepts its existence, even if it is a bad one. If a post is deleted, or i.e. non-visible, it means that the community thinks it adds no value to the overall quality or the comprehensiveness of the contents on Stack Exchange. That's (IMO) the primary difference between a low quality post and an actually deleted post, so I'd prefer to add this as a criterion for auto-deletion filter.

I think the more filters available for an automated process, the better the process can do. We can (by far) never expect an automation to work as accurately as a real human (moderators), so the best we could do is teaching it more rules to work with.