A clarification request for declined spam flag

Question

I flagged this post for obvious spam link inserted in the end when posted in Charcoal HQ. Check the first version here.

After looking at the user's profile and the link in the end, I flagged it as spam. I also posted a comment asking the user to state any affiliation to the site. In reply to that comment, he said that he was not affiliated with the site. Since his profile description and his statement contradicted each other, it attracted more flags.

He later deleted his post. And I got the flag declined notice with the following message:

declined - a moderator reviewed your flag, but found no evidence to support it

This declined reason is ambiguous. I guess the evidence is all there in the revision history. Though I don't have any issue with the declined flag, I would like to get clarification about it. Thanks.

Answer 1

I declined it as it was obvious that the user was not intending to only spam their site. At the point which i saw it the user was attempting to meet the wishes of the commenters.

Accepting the spam flag would have unduly penalised someone who (at that point) was simply trying to be helpful and had apparently accepted they were in the wrong and had engaged corrective actions.

To accept the spam flag would have had other effects:

• 6 flags (spam or offensive): post is locked, deleted, and the first revision owner loses 100 reputation.
• Each flag carries an implicit downvote for calculating the post's score (it does not affect the caster's reputation).

They would have been unable to correct their post, as asked, and would also have been blocked from further posts by the spam filter.

As it stands due to the number of downvotes they may well already be limited by other mechanisms such as the low quality post ban.

I considered their behaviour and the fact that they were, if not contrite, were at least willing to accept community standards and remove their unnecessary links. I didn't feel that they had come here to only spam their blog, they actually wanted to help.

Answer 2

Agreeing with Mokubai, I'd like to note that flags are used to keep the sites clean, not to punish anyone.

I was also among the people who flagged that as spam, but after I saw the effort to avoid being spammish that the OP had spent, I retracted the flag.

We don't want to spam-nuke anything potentially useful. We are only nuking honest spam with flags.

Answer 3

Well, while removal of spam is a valuable thing - in some situations its nice to have a certain degree of flexibility...

And well, this is one situation where the human touch works better than automation.

We have a user who doesn't know any better. There's a failure in educating him that what he did was bad. He's answer banned after, well he knew what was wrong.

A comment might have worked - considering the rest of his answers seemed ok. We could have edited and commented (which is often done). We've basically piled on votes on someone new to the system and he didn't know why he was wrong until it was too late for him. I'm seeing comments on some later posts.

Now, this is a broad situation - and I suppose its possibly considered to be a true positive. That said, we might want to be a bit careful when maximising paperclips.

I do wonder if we can get smokey and company to deal with these differently though. Maybe semi-auto comments before piling on the flags in this specific scenario?