Note for moderators: Some sites, including Stack Overflow, have more permissive, overriding guidance on the handling of these flags.
What makes something spam and when should I flag it?
A post should be marked as spam only if it advertises a product, service, or similar and is unsolicited or lacks disclosure.
Due to the way search engines work, this includes links. For example, an otherwise normal post that contains a link to a website only in a punctuation mark is still spam.
Unsolicited means that mentioning the product serves no purpose other than promotion. For example, if an answer mentions a software that may solve the asker’s problem or a question about web programming references a website as an example, this is not unsolicited (it may still be spam if there is an undisclosed affiliation).
Lacks disclosure means that the author is clearly affiliated with the product but does not disclose their affiliation. Note that a simple “my” may suffice. However, the disclosure must happen in the post itself; the author’s username or profile do not count.
If an otherwise valid post contains an apparent spam link, flag as spam. Do not try to salvage the post by removing the spam link.
It should not be marked as spam when:
The post contains no useful information, such as an answer that says “I don’t care about your problem”. Flag as not an answer instead.
It contains only gibberish, such as “fsdguejgkfdlk”. Use the rude or abusive flag for these cases.
##What makes something rude or abusive and when should I flag it?
A post should be marked as rude or abusive (formerly known as offensive) if it contains hate speech, obscenities, abuse against people, or abuse of the community or system, i.e., a clear violation of the be-nice policy.
Abuse of the system or community is everything that is created with the intention to harm them. This includes posts that contain no useful content at all – i.e. gibberish posts along the lines of:
asdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasd
As a rule of thumb, everything that would be out of place in polite discourse is rude or abusive.
If an otherwise valid post contains vulgar words as an expression of frustration, edit the bad part out instead of flagging the entire post as rude or abusive. If this results in an edit war or rollback war, flag for moderator attention.
Note that this is very different from handling an otherwise salvageable spam post.
Do not use this flag because:
A post criticises somebody or something in a civil manner.
A post is a (civil) rant in disguise. If any part of the post can be salvaged, edit out the rant-y parts. If not, vote or flag to close as primarily opinion-based (for questions) or flag as not an answer (for answers).
Somebody appears to have posted nonsense due to an innocent mistake such as a copy-and-paste error.
How does the spam flag differ from the rude or abusive flag?
The exact definitions of these terms are given above and the distinction can help moderators handle these flags if the problem is not blatantly obvious. (Note that if the spam or abuse is hidden, it may be necessary to elaborate this in a custom flag.)
Otherwise, the system currently does not differentiate between these flag types, with one exception: if a question gets two answers that are flagged as spam and deleted, it will be automatically protected. The same doesn't happen with rude or abusive flags.
##What effects do these flags have on a post?
Spam or rude or abusive flags (red flags) receive an extremely high priority in the moderation queue and come with severe penalties:
- 3 red flags on a question: question is banished from the front page and all question lists except search results.
- 6* red flags: post is locked and deleted, and the author loses 100 reputation. (Locking means that users with the moderator tools privilege (“10k users”) cannot edit or undelete it.)
- 1 red flag from a moderator has the same effect as 6 red flags from normal users: instant destruction.
- Contents of a post that was deleted and got at least one valid red flag, will be hidden.
- Each red flag, during its validity, carries an implicit downvote from the Community user, and it does not affect the flagger’s reputation.
* on English Language & Usage and The Workplace, 3 flags (instead of 6) are sufficient.
When are these flags removed?
You can retract spam and rude or abusive flags like all other flags. They also expire after four days if the thresholds aren’t reached. (Previously, they expired after two days - source.)
Rolling back a post to a previous state will revert to the number of flags from that particular revision. This allows the author (or someone else with edit rights) to rollback a post to which someone else introduced spam, rude, or abusive content in a later revision.
In addition, these flags can be cleared by moderators, whether active or already dismissed. This will cause the flags to be marked as disputed, even though they may have been marked helpful in the past. Since these flags carry heavy weight on the post and its author, a special mechanism is provided to clear borderline flags without penalizing anyone (declining the flag would penalize the flagger). In addition, this is sometimes used to remove bad audits from the review queues, as these flags usually cause the posts to become review audits.
