36
votes
Accepted
Why is the site being flooded with junk right now? What is being done about it?
Once in a while, people decide to post strange things here. I would recommend not giving them the pleasure of a response. The best thing to do is flag and ignore.
S. CarnahanMod
- 45.7k
31
votes
Accepted
How to deal with questions referencing/promoting questionable/'fake' research?
I think (as a non-member of the mathoverflow community, I just flag spam here) that the spam flag fits perfectly.
[e]xists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the
author's ...
- 101
18
votes
Flagging spam user
There are now lots of similarly named accounts (having to do with car insurance) showing up in Recent Badges. I think they are effectively spamming in the Recent Badges space.
Going back further, ...
- 29.7k
16
votes
What should I do when I see a spam post on MO?
Any user with at least 15 reputation points should flag the post as spam. After 6 spam flags, the post is deleted. In addition to being deleted, even for users who can see the deleted posts, the ...
16
votes
Companies accounts allowed?
There aren't any rules against it.
However, that doesn't mean that your company profile can go around posting links to your website/product in all your answers: the rules outlined in the help ...
- 101
15
votes
Accepted
Flagging spam user
I'm happy to hear what the community thinks, but my instinctual reaction would be to destroy it. The account has no business here and the page is meanwhile free billboard space: not something I think ...
- 53.3k
15
votes
Should tags be removed from spam?
No. Spam should be flagged as spam and removed. Please limit your interactions with spam posts to exactly that.
- 39.7k
15
votes
Accepted
Filtering out the Autobiographer badge from "Recent Badges"
UPDATE:
We've blocked Autobiographer from appearing in the recent badges list network-wide so I've removed the general block of bronze badges described below. For more information on the changes that ...
- 101
15
votes
More spam bots than usual?
Yesterday (April 17th) the site was "under attack" between (approximately) 08:00 UTC and 11:00 UTC. During this period, I myself flagged 23 posts as spam. Besides downvoting and flagging as ...
- 5,407
14
votes
Accepted
Why was my spam flag declined on an answer that does nothing but promote the answerer's book?
The answer under consideration is not spam, because it is a valid answer to the question that was asked (and the question was more or less on-topic for this site).
Ideally, we would like some kind of ...
S. CarnahanMod
- 45.7k
13
votes
Companies accounts allowed?
The SEO trick won't work; for users with a reputation less than 2000, the link has a nofollow attribute, which makes Google ignore it for SEO purposes.
According ...
- 2,821
10
votes
Accepted
Influx of ridiculous number of spam users – what to do?
Unless the accounts start posting there's nothing to worry about. It's spam, yes, but low impact spam whose purpose (search engine optimization) is blocked wholesale by the SE software.
The general ...
- 39.7k
8
votes
Accepted
Ability to flag user accounts as spam
I brought this up in the Charcoal HQ chat (about Charcoal). They pointed out a few technical hurdles, and also pointed me to evidence that SE has simply decided this issue is not important enough to ...
- 63.9k
5
votes
Why was my spam flag declined on an answer that does nothing but promote the answerer's book?
I did not process that flag, but I agree with whoever did. I think "spamming" is often construed overly broadly anyway. In my mind, the first criterion for judgment should be relevancy, with ...
- 53.3k
4
votes
Accepted
How to report intrisically spammy user accounts?
I've tried destroying a few accounts with spammy profiles, and it takes less than 30 seconds to do each one. However, looking through the list of "autobiographer" badge recipients, I would ...
S. CarnahanMod
- 45.7k
3
votes
More spam bots than usual?
This answer is community wiki - feel free to edit it if you have some useful information to add.
In case somebody wants to have a look at some stats about spam - for example to compare the current ...
3
votes
Should tags be removed from spam?
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 ...
- 4,713
3
votes
My question looks like spam
By trimming the question down to half (until example with $\frac{1}{\beta-\alpha}$) I could post it and then edit it to full length without problem. The comments to my question indicated that this is ...
- 237
2
votes
Flagging spam user
There is no clearly defined networkwide policy on this topic, because the rules on self-promotion only apply to posts, not user profiles. Your ‘About me’ is your own space, and as long as it’s not ...
- 2,821
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible