2

There's a lot of moderation tools here at SE. Privileges and authority are staggered differently on different SE sites. It seems though that most tools and options are only directed towards posts and rarely (if ever) directed towards users.

Take for instance a post, just now:

according to the privileges explanations:

When should I delete questions?

Closed questions that are of no lasting value whatsoever should be flagged and deleted.

Looking at the account of the user who posted this though:

it's pretty clear that the account is just solely made up to spam. There doesn't seem to be any tools though to take care of these kind of accounts.

Am I missing anything?

If I'm not missing anything shouldn't there be some sort of tool to take care of this sort of thing?

edit:

Half an hour later:

same user, same junk

If there were tools for moderators to take care of this kind of stuff - this could have been avoided.

edit 2:

and again later:

I have already edited this post twice since the first spam - but couldn't do anything to prevent it...

6
  • I think about all you can do as a user is flag as spam / offensive / abusive as appropriate, move on and hope six others do the same to delete the post. As you're seeing now once a lot of these trolls get the automatic post ban they just create new accounts anyway.
    – PeterJ
    Jun 22, 2014 at 4:52
  • Sure, but it took like 5-6 posts before post ban came into action and another two new account have already shown up...so we've got to put up with another 10-12 posts? Even when someone could potentially do something? If given the right tools, of corse.
    – Mou某 Mod
    Jun 22, 2014 at 5:07
  • 百度贴吧 has much experience on dealing with such a problem: 1. CAPTCHA; 2. read-only mode for users whose level is below some threshold. They're called 贴吧神兽, which can even to some extent stop premeditated giant "spam flood" attack (kind of DoS, called 爆吧). Now we have peace and love on our site, maybe we don't need such tools yet.
    – Stan
    Jun 22, 2014 at 6:38
  • It is possible to delete spamming users, but only ♦ moderators can do it.
    – hichris123
    Jun 22, 2014 at 16:12
  • @hichris123 As PeterJ said, it wouldn't work, "they just create new accounts". Several spammers don't matter, but when sometime they prepare a DoS attack using thousands of IDs, it will be definitely terrible.
    – Stan
    Jun 22, 2014 at 16:47
  • 1
    @Stan Destroying an account as a spammer actually feeds it into an automatic spam-blocking system. Spam flags do that too, but this helps it even more.
    – hichris123
    Jun 22, 2014 at 16:50

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

In such situations, simply flag the post with a custom reason calling for a moderator's attention:

enter image description here

Such flags are highly visible to moderators, and if one is around and it's a clear-cut case, they can take effective measures (such as banning the account).

Details about the flagging mechanism

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .