For the mods: question about flagging?

The flags are sent to us by email. We log into our accounts and view them there. So it depends on the email provider. I use Inbox. This sorts in date order. It also puts like with like so if two of you flag the same thing for any reason, I see them both together. I don’t look at the reason if it is obvious it is spam. I would check to see why it’s been flagged, if I can’t work it out when I look at the user/question/answer.

If you suspect spam then go ahead and mark it as spam. It doesn’t matter too much for spam but does help for other reasons. We all have highly tuned spam radar!

Thank you for your vigilance!

As far as I can remember (it’s been a while), different categories aren’t prioritized. So things marked spam don’t get handled differently than a flag about a personal attack or inappropriate answer. And even if you or I say ‘this is spam’, the mod should evaluate the content before removing the post.

There are days when I am up early and on Fluther. This is when I tend to find spam users, as opposed to questions or answers. Does it help to report a user who has not asked or answered? Also, if a question or answer has been flagged as spam, should we bother to report the user? I would hate to overload the mods’ email boxes. :-)

We have quite a good spam catching system so if it’s really obvious, you can leave it – we will get it.

I always flag spam as spam, it is usually, more than obvious so not a challenge to pick the appropriate category.
I think there needs to be more discernment between “unhelpful” vs. “personal attack.” many of the posts that are flagged or modded as personal attacks are nothing more than an answer that could be deemed “unhelpful” but certainly not an attack. As always, it is in the flaggers/mods perception of the content IMO.

Is the reason you don’t know for sure that it is spam because it’s a word link if that’s what they are called not straight forward url “www. ....”? I have started to never use word links. If it is a long url I use tinyurl and give the search term.

@flo if you hover over the link, the URL appears at the bottom of your browser. So feel free to use a link disguised in a word. For known users it’s not a problem.

Thanks @Stnley. I find it does no harm to post straight forward url or the tinyurl along with the search term for the 1 out of many people who don’t know about the hovering.