@TimCampion The above post is partly a reaction to our recent conversation here in chat.

@Glorfindel As you can see above I have recently created some kind of "FAQ" post about spam on MathOverflow Meta.

I think that it might be suitable to add also an answer explaining some basics about SD and Charcoal.

I do not user Charcoal that much beyond occasionally reporting a post which was not caught.

So I can't say much beyond that about the project. (If this suffices, I will add one more paragraph about SD and possibility of reporting into my answer.)

But since you have much more experience with SmokeDetector and Charcoal, I wanted to ask whether you would be willing to post an answer explaining some basic information about SD.

I will add that both the question and the answers posted there are CW - so if you consider including information about SD into the existing answer a better solution than a separate answr, feel free to do so.

If there is a separate answer, possibly a link to the other answer should be added to the existing one - in the last paragraph which already mentions SD. (Something along the lines: For more details about SmokeDetector, see [another answer to this question](https://meta.mathoverflow.net/a/4261).

At least in theory, if the information about spam flags is mentioned on meta and more users become aware of this, it might help to get spam removed faster. Although my impression is that it is usually removed relatively quickly. (Of course, since I report every spam post I see to SD, that might contribute to quick removal of those post. So I am not really an unbiased observer.)

In any case, I don't think this complain from a few years ago is still valid: deleting junk spam more quickly. (But that was also part of the motivation for creating the above post on meta.)

In the linked post the OP said this:

> Is it technically possible that one of the moderators just deletes such posts as soon as a "flag as spam" comes in, without putting it on the revision list and waiting for 5 persons to waste their time with that garbage?

I think that it's better if some basic moderation task and site maintenance is done by the community - and only the staff that really needs some help from moderators is left from them. (And I'd count removing spam into those task that can be done by the community - and the community can handle spam more efficiently than moderators would be able to.)

@MartinSleziak that's a good idea. Perhaps you should add something about when a post is considered spam on Stack Exchange? E.g. repeatedly posting nonsense is called 'spamming' on a few other sites I frequent(ed).

I haven't got time right now to write a detailed answer about Charcoal/SmokeDetector, but I will post a Q&A on our Team to create one together, since this might come up for more sites than MathOverflow.

@Glorfindel I have added to the first bullet point: "A post is considered spam only if it advertises a product, service, or similar and is unsolicited or lacks disclosure. This is elaborated in more detail in the linked network-wide FAQ."

It's basically copy-past from the FAQ post.

> you can even mention the post in chat to attract attention of other users - I will mention Charcoal which is a chat room related to and SmokeDetector which is a project with a specific goal to help with detecting spam in the Stack Exchange network.

> (In particular, one way to help the project is to report the posts which were not detected by this software. You can find out more about this in the SmokeDetector wiki and in the Charcoal HQ chatroom.)

@Glorfindel I have edited the answer so that currently it contains the text quoted above. With the intention that when some Q&A about this is created, we can replace some of this text with the link.

I have also linked to Get Involved - that page gives some basic overview for the interested users.

Thank you, I gotta run now ...

See you later! And thanks!

I see that Makyen has edited the answer. Any information from him on these issues can certainly be considered reliable.

Hi @Makyen. I see that you have omitted: "(A post is considered spam only if it advertises a product, service, or similar and is unsolicited or lacks disclosure. This is elaborated in more detail in the linked network-wide FAQ.)"

Since I was not sure whether that was intentional or whether both you and me edited revision 2 and it lead to conflict which ended with this outcome.

I have added the sentence in parenthesis after Glorfindel's remark: "Perhaps you should add something about when a post is considered spam on Stack Exchange? E.g. repeatedly posting nonsense is called 'spamming' on a few other sites I frequent(ed)."

@MartinSleziak That would be an edit conflict. I did not intentionally remove it. I'll add them back in (I'm currently fixing some grammar I messed up, so I'll do it at the same time).

Thanks! And thanks also for contributing to the posts.

Interestingly, I did not get any notice of the edit conflict.

@MartinSleziak np. I'm happy to do so.

One of the things I thought about was mentioning that spam flags and rude/abusive flags "add together" towards the six flags limit, but I did not find a concise formulation. So I am glad to see that you managed to formulate that in a reasonable way.

I wonder if the lack of notice is affected by the post being community wiki. Normally, I'd expect the banner across the top of the page with notice of another edit.

Yeah, that one is always a bit tricky. I'm not that happy with how I ended up wording it, but I think it communicates.

Originally I suggested to Glorfindel that there might be a separate answer about SD/Charcoal.

But the way the post is written now looks find - the paragraph about SD explains it clearly explains some basic info and provides further links

So probably a separate answer is not needed - the way it is now looks fine to me.

I had not read the chat you had with Glorfindel prior to you pointing to it from here. I'd be fine with having a separate answer, but as you've said, it's probably not needed at this point. In addition, at least on some other sites, Q&A in the FAQ are kept as fairly strictly to a single answer. I haven't checked to see if that's the case on MO.

I'd guess not. At least this post is tagged faq and it is split into several answers: Frequently asked questions about tagging on MathOverflow.

But, as you said, a separate answer is probably not needed - so that's not really important here.

Almost time for my daily commute. See you later!