Should we flag gibberish answers as spam?

Question

I just had a "not an answer" flag declined, which hasn't happened in quite some time. It reads:

declined - This is not "not an answer", this is SPAM. Flag as such.

However, if I recall correctly, the post concerned (reproduced here) isn't spam at all. I cannot actually see it anymore (on account of it being deleted), but unless it was edited between the time I flagged it and when the flag was reviewed, it was simply nonsense gibberish. I suppose you could call such junk answers spam, if the full definition of the spam flag wasn't so explicit:

This question is effectively an advertisement with no disclosure. It is not useful or relevant, but promotional.

And I'm pretty sure that didn't apply.

Now, one of the moderators obviously felt strongly about this (actually declining the flag out of spite, then deleting the post), but I figured I'd ask here anyway: In the future, should I flag gibberish answers as spam or not?

Answer 1

Declining a flag that you're going to act on seems ridiculous, even under a strict definition of the word "helpful". And the SE policy is specifically a lax definition of the word "helpful". Jeff has said:

Declining a flag should be exceedingly rare.

And:

[A]nything that helps keep the streets clean of trash is helpful, even if omg that item should have been recycled not thrown in the trash, you moron! We can't expect users to understand the subtleties of recycling every time they see a bit of trash on the street and point it out; penalizing them for this is insane and harmful.

One more:

[A]s mods, you should always assume the flagger was trying to be helpful except in the case of compelling evidence to the contrary.

Regardless of what the "perfect" flag might be, your flag was helpful under this definition and certainly better than not flagging at all. As badp noted in his Meta post there are several somewhat applicable flag reasons and it's a purely subjective judgment call. Having a slightly different opinion than a mod shouldn't result in your flag weight going down; from the point of view of the system it now views you as less capable of identifying things needing to be dealt with, despite the opposite being true.

I have my moments where I disagree with the policy Jeff handed down, but nonetheless it's our policy and effort is better spent trying to change it than ignoring it. And regardless, I again think that declining a flag and then acting on it is ridiculous.

Answer 2

To answer your actual question (rather than issue), per this post on Meta Stack Overflow:

When should the Spam flag be used?

A question should be marked as spam ONLY when it consists of undiscriminated bulk advertisement. It should NOT be marked as spam in the following cases:

• The answer contains no useful information (such as an answer that says "I don't care about your problem")
• It contains gibberish (such as "fsdguejgkfdlk")

So no, you should not flag gibberish answers as spam.

Answer 3

Just to throw more fuel on the fire, we should keep in mind that posts marked as spam automatically hand out a -100 reputation penalty, whereas posts marked as not an answer and subsequently deleted do not.

Personally, if I leave my laptop open and my son mashes on the keyboard and manages to post a garbage question / answer, I would rather not get hit with a -100 rep penalty, just so that we can clean up the site without involving a moderator.

Answer 4

Disclaimer: This was originally meant as a comment, however it got far to many letters for that, so I wrote it as an answer instead.

First let me say, I respect your decision, however I do not agree with it. I wish this would have been handled differently. Anyways, what is done is done. It's in the past and cannot be undone, so let us focus on the future instead, and improve on how this will be handled in the future. So please look at this as constructive critique, as that is my intention.

Going by your own saying:

What this post would normally receive on its own is 8 "not an answer" flags, 6 "very low quality" flags and perhaps a couple "moderator attention" flags, when the community could very simply and easily have deleted the post on its own through half as many spam or offensive flags.

It's clearly obvious that a lot of us see the flag reasoning differently than you did. And the flags should not have been declined. Instead you should have brought this up on the meta, since there clearly is a dispute of our views.

A reason for this might be due to poor wording of the offensive flag description:

This question contains content that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.

As Tim Stone mentioned in a comment somewhere: Since the "abusive" part is smashed in the middle of offensive and hate speech. I would not consider gibberish abusive. But rather something more offensive than just gibberish. What that might be I have no idea.

However, now that it is explained to me, I can see the error in my reasoning. And I'm sure there are more of us seeing it this way.

---

As you said in a comment:

Again, that's been an exceptional behavior for an exceptional case. Stop worrying about it.

This cannot happen, and frankly should never happen. There shouldn't be any exceptional cases for flagging. As it will only make us more confused about what to flag as, and would likely make us flag less. Additionally, I have always flagged cases like this as "Not an answer", as I found it the most suitable flag, and it has always been approved by mods. When suddenly one of these gets declined, it would only make me more "afraid" of flagging, as I don't want to lose more of my flag weight.

Anna Lear brings up a good point as well:

If flagging as spam or offensive is gonna be policy, mods have to take extra care to dismiss appropriately since those special flags don't auto-dismiss as helpful when the answer is deleted like other flags do

Flag weight is there to reward us for appropriate flagging, so what is the point of flagging something we won't get rewarded for, when there is a reward system implemented? Yes, it is to help the site. But honestly, when there is a reward system in place for it, I would like to get that reward when flagging appropriately.
So we either need to enforce a rule that posts like this should be flagged with a red flag, or let it be fine with a non red flag. If it's the latter, this should never happen again.

TL;DR

You should have explained to us that we were using the wrong flag, before handling the situation like you did. And we should make this clearer for the future. Should flags like this be declined in the future, or allowed?

Answer 5

Here's what happened:

LessPop linked on chat to a post that was clearly spam, I told people that, for once, I wouldn't be going to touch it and I wanted the community to handle it, because you don't need moderator intervention to handle such posts. Regular flagging with red flags will do.

I then looked again and what I saw was people not downvoting it, people not flagging it as spam or offensive, just people casting soft flags such as "not an answer" or "very low quality".

Those flags are honestly terrible flags that say absolutely nothing about what's the problem with the post and what should be done:

• Is the post a "me too!"?
• Is the post a "thank you!"?
• Is the post a comment on the question?
• Is the post a comment reply to another comment?
• Is the post a reply to another answer?
• Is the post another question altogether?

These flags need moderator attention however, because the required actions are not available to most/enough users. Garbage posts do not.

Since there was no spam/offensive flag on the post, I dismissed them as "this is spam, flag as spam". Then people started flagging as spam. When I checked it again and there were 5 spam flags, so instead of letting the post live on further I simply did what anybody else could've done in the meantime and delete the post like a regular user.

The point of all this was making sure that if such a thing happens off-hours when nobody's there to see it, it'd be gone on its own without mod intervention, because you don't need mod intervention to make it go.

That was my drive: making sure moderator intervention is not needed to handle garbage.

Apparently my drive was instead abusing the power to cause massive underserved flag weight loss and whatnot and causing 30 hours of drama everywhere.

I'm sorry about my attempt to improve the community. It seems that instead I drove a lot of people off flagging (the flag queue suggests otherwise) and you drove me off flag handling given that every single time a moderator makes a mistake that inevitably translates in 30 hours of flaming, bickering and complaining (the fact I'm still here suggests otherwise).

Jeez, we're humans too.

---

If it's pretty mindblowingly obvious that the post is complete and utter gibberish (link), it needs to go, and it needs to go fast, so make it go. Get it off the site as soon as possible. As Shog9 said:

The last flag option reads,

(o) it is not welcome in our community
This question contains content that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech.

I would say "not welcome" and "abusive" pretty much sum up the content of that post. And I'm a pretty reasonable person.

The average moderator response time to flags this month has been 5 hours 40 minutes. We can't allow such posts to stay online for so long.