@one2three Ok, I'll just try and leave the core facts here for you.
This individual has been posting very rude "questions" and "answers" here for weeks. It shows classic attention-seeking behaviour, for example excessive commenting if nobody reacts. According to the "don't feed the trolls" rule, we try to interact as little as possible with these posts.
So whenever this "Jeff" (or similar name) posts, it is important to flag his posts asap. Reason: If a post recieved enough flags or downvotes it can be blocked or deleted automatically. They will be visible only to high-rep users. Have you ever seen an answer with -5? That's the reason.
Usually our mods are pretty quick in deleting both posts and the account, but comunity support is probably appreciated. (It is on other SE sites, admittedly I never outright asked a mod here.)
Thank you for coming here, I didn't want to discuss this under the post in question, actively denying the prankster the satisfaction of attention. Oh, and for some weird reason @Erica is his usual target, but is very brave at ignoring this.
@Stephie community support is appreciated here too :) the spam filters caught him this time, since he always uses anonymous IP addresses like any spammer. Always flag as abusive in addition to downvoting.
@one2three Best advice: Ignore it. I do. We deal with this quietly and promptly. We were targeted because we became "visible", I guess. Flag, downvote, move on.
Well I can at least confirm that the flagging system is darn quick: At the last deluge in ELL there were so many people in chat, sometimes the crap was gone before I could switch over to the main site...
@Beofett, you have been mod for a while, perhaps you could explain something for me:
On some other SE (if I could only remember...) there was the rule do not edit offensive posts. I think it was so that others could see and flag promptly. How is this handeled here? Or was this only for partitially offensive stuff...?
@Stephie I honestly don't know. Generally, I think it's a good idea, but for this specific case, since its a serial poster with a known pattern, I'm removing the content so that he loses the satisfaction. If the mods want me to leave it, I'm perfectly happy to, but in my (admittedly outdated) experience here on parenting, offensive flags tend to come a bit more slowly
@Beofett Found it: meta.german.stackexchange.com/questions/838/… But that's another case, it concerns edits without flagging. Ok, unless the mods suggest otherwise I'll follow your example.
(Am still learning about how this entire SE system works and trying to grasp the typical quirks of each comunity.)
@Beofett is right, flags are sometimes slow on here due to traffic levels. So editing can be justified for really egregious content. Or this guy who everyone knows.
But always throw a flag on because that helps the backend learn his pattern.
The Playground
The Playground