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We have spammers on the site.

Normally, you vote them down + flag: spam.

However, if the spammer also self-answers their own post with an answer (that is also spam btw), what do we do to the answer?

Also vote down + flag:spam? or also delete vote the answer?

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  • 4
    Spam flag both.
    – Magisch
    Jul 17, 2018 at 8:33

2 Answers 2

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This has been discussed on Meta Stack Exchange: Why shouldn't I downvote spam that I've already flagged?

Bottom line: downvoting spam isn't really useful, and in some cases, downvoting spam questions can reduce their visibility on the home page if you're early with your flag and vote. In most cases, it doesn't really matter and if it gives you extra satisfaction, just do it.

Voting to delete spam is another matter, and I would not recommend doing that. The reason is that the full penalty for spam flags (-100 reputation and a reduced posting rate or even a block) is only applied when six spam flags have been cast (or a ♦ moderator casts a spam flag). If you have a post with 5 or less spam flags and 3 20k users vote to delete it, the post is deleted and locked, the flags are marked helpful but those penalties are not applied. Because the flags are removed from the ♦ flag queue, they don't know about the post and cannot apply those penalties later (unless they're notified in another way, but that rarely happens).

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Voting a question down can actually hide it from certain views of the home page so if it is just plain spam it can actually reduce its visibility to other users who would otherwise have flagged it as spam as well. Once it is hidden you may have to wait for a mod to notice the spam flags to finish the job.

Just flagging as spam automatically issues a downvote so "hitting it harder" with an extra downvote is not really necessary and can actually prolong the time the question is "live".

For answers you should just flag them as you normally would. As with questions if the community (or a mod) agrees then it will go away all the same.

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