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I'm a bit confused about what I just saw and would love to get some clearification.

I was just doing post reviews and came across an answer that had written above it:

Our system has identified this post as possible spam; please review carefully

The answer looked really good to me though, I couldn't see any sort of spam in it. I looked at the question and it had the same notice above it, but again, the question looked perfectly fine.

I wasn't sure if that was an audit, expecting me to downvote or flag the answer but since I felt like this answer was really good, I gave it an upvote. Turns out, I passed the audit.

What I'm wondering here now is what the notice above the post means. I have never seen it before and searching for the message on meta reveals no results. The post is clearly not spam and I think especially in an audit review this can cause a lot of confusion as to how to treat/review the post.


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This is actually driven by the spam detection system, where posts or edits from untrusted networks can trigger the alert to help folks recognize the need to be extra-vigilant: The review system suggested something was probably spam, what should I do when I see this?

This is also used on audits, primarily so that you don't get too confident in the system's ability to detect spam and start rubber-stamping anything with the alert.

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  • That explains it, thanks! So does that mean the audit post was actually detected as a possible spam by the system, or is that just added in the audit as a "test"?
    – confetti
    Aug 26, 2018 at 2:03
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    Very unlikely for an audit, although IIRC this has triggered on audits before when the author of the post used for the audit happened to arrive from a VPN or something.
    – Shog9
    Aug 26, 2018 at 2:10

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