@CodyGray One of the benefits is catching spam without the domain link. So "Hey, check out this totally awesome product called (x)! (no link)" would be caught. It's also used to catch people who put that product name as their username. That's... About it, though.
If it gets bumped up to the blacklist, and the user puts it as their username, Bad keyword in username is a pretty hefty weight boost.
The short answer is that it makes promoting one of them to a blacklist entry later easier, because SD automatically moves exact duplicate entries between the lists
suppose I watch foo(?:\.com)?. I later want to blacklist foo\.com once it meets the criteria. I must now unwatch foo(?:\.com)?, watch foo(?!\.com), blacklist-website foo\.com.
But yeah, I really don't like it when spam gets handled by autoflags because then a mod cannot remove the user and/or take additional steps to prevent that account from posting more spam.
I could look through a list of all the posts that have been spam-flagged, but that doesn't work on SO. Might work on a smaller site.
I've... Had a couple instances where blatant spam was either left stick around or edited to be the exact same just without the link by a mod. I don't kick up a fuss but it does bother me a fair bit sometimes.
As to Meta, you do seem to wade through that place a good bit. I lurked in it for awhile recently roundabouts the time I asked that question about spam flags not deleting questions, but since I've tried to stay away. MSO's wild sometimes.
"deleted by user" means it was deleted by a flag from a completely different user. I had to sanitize the name. It doesn't mean that the author of the comment self-censored.
@CodyGray and now it is! :-) but really I put it on MSE because that's where they were getting feedback about the onboarding changes, for which I hope that's top-of-mind. Hopefully in a way that educates existing users why they're wrong about what constitutes a good question.
It's sort of a pity that that MSO question is going to be hidden due to its score, because the answers would be quite useful for a lot of said existing users to read.
@CodyGray Yeah, fair. I suppose I'm more interested in what sort of tricks voting fraudsters are up to these days that result in that much voting reversal.
But I know that's not really any of my business, and there are good reasons to keep that private.
I mean, I'd certainly be annoyed to lose 3k rep, especially if that was a quarter of my rep. I obviously wouldn't react like that person did in the comments, though.
Which is to say: I'd argue it does matter to get the invalidation right, but also the reaction was totally uncalled for.
I'm interested enough to check back in a week or so and see where they land at the end of the process. Should give a rough idea of the true magnitude of actual fraud.
@RyanM Yes. There definitely was. But a somewhat new staff member probably got a bit too aggressive, interpreting what we’re legitimate voting patterns on a small, incestuous tag as fraud.
It’s not even like what was done was wrong. Just, arguably not the best approach, and one of our exceptionally thorough SO mods caught it and asked for a review.
@Spevacus There’s so much fraud that never gets caught. And so much more that gets overlooked in the interest of not invalidating too much or causing too much disruption.
@CodyGray That pattern looks like it's already caught by Potentially bad keyword in body and Potentially bad keyword in answer Append -force to the command if you really want to add this pattern.
I feel like that spam would have been better suited to Law.SE, given the targeting at lawyers. I will not be employing his poorly targeted SEO services.
What would be wrong with allowing the domain to match?
I didn't see that as a bug, but rather a feature. It was dressed in a very dashing suit.
user435118
Duplicate detections as the domain can be matched in both watches whereas we want one watch for the whole domain, and one watch just for the domain name without the .in.
[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, bad keyword in title, link at end of body, pattern-matching product name in body, potentially bad keyword in body (390): BodyCor Keto Weight Loss by Marryllewis on askubuntu.com (@Ollie)