Why was this question deleted and locked because it was “marked as spam or rude or abusive” by community bot within seconds of adding inline images?

Question

Haven’t see the community bot do this before: A question was posted that, I will admit, seemed a bit like a troll over here: “What happens if you plug in a USB-USB cable into a wireless mouse's USB receiver? Can you convert it to a wired mouse?”

I edited it to add two images from outside sources that were set without issue. But the second I saved the post, the community bot seemed to sweep in and close the question within a second or two of me doing that.

Why did that happen? My only assumption is that behind the scenes the system detected a pattern of behavior from a known troll IP address and/or browser fingerprint.

Is my assumption correct? I mean the question most likely was a troll, but doesn’t that mean it stays up, gets downvoted, voted to close and disappears “the olde fashioned way?”

Answer 1

Took a quick look at the user and its a known troll we've been tracking across the network. With their history, they tend to create loads of new accounts to evade suspensions, and leaving their question in place tends to give them an incentive to do it. The means by which the post was handled was the most efficient way to deal with it.

While we have ways to identify the user in question (and we neither confirm nor deny the use of highly trained sniffer rats, since we currently have a canine mod shortage), if we shared the details, the person behind the account is going to adapt, so we'd decline to share the means by which we detected the user.