When flagging spam, I usually delete tags and replace them by tag-removed as well. I just received a comment suggesting that this is not useful. It probably doesn't matter much either way, as spam usually disappears quite quickly. Does anyone else have an opinion?
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asked Dec 13, 2022 at 13:51
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7$\begingroup$ It is better to not edit spam posts at all, and just flag them as spam (see Should spam posts be edited? on Meta SE). $\endgroup$– The AmplitwistCommented Dec 13, 2022 at 14:25
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2$\begingroup$ Thanks for bringing this up here. I was the original commenter. I don't have much of a presence on this particular site; I basically only flag spam. $\endgroup$– tripleeeCommented Dec 13, 2022 at 16:31
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1$\begingroup$ Re: spam usually disappears quite quickly. That all depends on your definition of "quickly". As mentioned in the MO chatroom, median seems to be around 25 minutes on main and 50 minutes on meta. $\endgroup$– Martin SleziakCommented Dec 25, 2022 at 9:56
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$\begingroup$ That surprises me, I think the average that I have observed is much less. $\endgroup$– Neil StricklandCommented Dec 26, 2022 at 10:23
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2 Answers
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No. Spam should be flagged as spam and removed. Please limit your interactions with spam posts to exactly that.
answered Dec 13, 2022 at 15:05
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This would be probably more suitable as a comment, but it is too long - to have some stats on this, I'll include some SEDE queries. (So that one can estimate how often tags such as tag-removed and spam are used for spam posts.)
The table Votes includes spam as VoteTypeId = 12, so at least some data can be obtained from this database. (I do not claim that the data there are perfectly reliable - some spam posts might have been deleted without being flagged; somebody might have flagged a post which actually isn't spam. But such exceptions will probably be rare.)
- Among the spam posts, SEDE returns 111 questions tagged tag-removed and 7 questions tagged spam. (The tag spam was created a few times in the past - naturally, after the question was deleted the tag was gone.)
- Here are numbers of spam posts for all tags and only non-existent tags.
- Looking at the recent posts flagged as spam, the tag tag-removed appears repeatedly - but not too often.
Both tags were briefly mentioned in chat (in connection with spam) - the tag spam and the tag tag-removed.
Some related posts elsewhere:
- Tagging spam / offensive questions (on Meta Stack Exchange)
- Should spam be tagged as [spam]? (Meta Stack Exchange)
- The tag spam was mentioned on the old tea in the thread "Tag merge/rename requests" (page 2 and page 3) - but that was in a completely different context.
As usually, I will include a link to this post: What should I do when I see a spam post on MO? (Although editing tags isn't mentioned there explicitly - only editing in general.)
answered Dec 13, 2022 at 16:05