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I have just flagged a post on Super User only to see the user was spamming about six posts. I flagged each, only to stumble upon another user doing the same thing. I flagged each post, but I was wondering if there is a method of flagging a user for review rather than a specific post.

I could have marked the post as "other" flag and added a comment, but is that acceptable?

2 Answers 2

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Any good-faith, honest flag of anything marked with the "other" category is fine, and as long as your request is in compliance with the site rules and guidelines and de facto community policies, it will be carried out. That said, you should only use the "other" category when the reason you're flagging it for does not fit at all into any of the existing categories of flag reasons.

But no, you can not flag a user. If you need to report a specific user having bad behavior, you can alert a moderator in Root Access chat.

You can also flag their posts as spam if they're clearly just being a bad actor: if a user gets a lot of posts flagged as spam by many different users, they'll be auto-deleted, and the user will be question and/or answer-banned from the site automatically with no moderator intervention. This is really the best result for everyone: you get helpful flags, the user goes away, the spam gets deleted, and no moderators were harmed in the process :)

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  • Thanks for the answer. Just wanted to avoid having 10 flags in rapid succession. Don't want to waste moderator time if there was a quicker way. Root chat might be a better method, but I shall continue flagging as suggested. Thanks
    – Matthew Williams
    Commented Mar 13, 2014 at 13:59
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    You should link to Ask a Super User Moderator instead of Root Access.
    – gparyani
    Commented Mar 14, 2014 at 5:59
  • Just a little heads-up that the (SSL) “https” link to the chat fails to load correctly for me (and I'm guessing for others too) but the “http” works and loads as expected. Maybe worth an edit? I would suggest the edit myself, but I don't have enough reputation at this Meta (yet) so the edit link is grayed out for me. ;)
    – e-sushi
    Commented Mar 23, 2014 at 12:16
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    @e-sushi Whoops, my bad. I access chat via HTTPS and have my browser set to allow loading resources over regular HTTP (which Firefox and Chrome don't, by default). I keep forgetting to delete that "s" so most people can view it right away ;p
    – allquixotic
    Commented Mar 23, 2014 at 17:20
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Flagging the posts is just fine.

If we see 6 posts by a new/unregistered user flagged by 10 people, we know what to do.

That being said, please don't actively seek our all posts by the user to flag them. Just flag the post you see.

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    If I want to flag a user, wouldn't it be simpler to flag=>other and just leave a message explaining that I'm flagging the user in general rather than a specific post? The "other" messages are read by human mods (assuming the mods are human that is), not parsed right?
    – terdon
    Commented Mar 14, 2014 at 0:42
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    @terdon It's fine in the sense that it will also be handled at some point. If individual posts are flagged, that increases the flag counters on those posts, bringing them to the top of the list. Also, if there are 10+ flags waiting in the queue, I'm much more likely to check it than if there's only one. But that's just me
    – Oliver Salzburg Mod
    Commented Mar 14, 2014 at 8:15

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