Processed Meat

I saw the below question pop up. Something with really poor grammar, but at least kinda on-topic for Super User. By the time I clicked through however, the question had been edited into your standard spam faire. I checked the revisions before the spam was cleaned up, and less than a minute had pa...

In order to be more efficiently flag spam, especially during a spam wave users should see what post they already flagged. Currently, there is no way of knowing whether one already flagged a post or not until one opens the post and presses flag. This costs time and is rather annoying for the user....

Recently, Super User got hit by a big spam wave, so much that people started to run out of flags as described here. Since spam is a really-easy-to-tell-in-most-cases flaggable thing, is there a reason why allowed flags shouldn't carry over to other sites specifically for spam, or just stuff in ge...

Today a spam answer was posted in ASE: https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/108003/42636 Not only is this answer spam, it is obviously written with AI, which raises the question if it is possible for a bot to make a user account here... I could ot figure out how to flag a user (most likely I'm ju...

To address spam waves, it'd be convenient to be able to flag multiple questions at once as spam.

Today another spam wave hit SU and metasmoke is down, even cow is about to hit the limit and the new page isn't looking that pretty: I ran out of flags quite some time ago and even users with 100 seem close to doing so. While this posts is mainly to bring attention to staff, any help will be app...

For the past few months, there has been an on and off massive spam wave primarily focuses on Super User, which has encompassed thousands upon thousands of spam posts, all of which need to be nuked through 4 spam flags in order to be deleted. Smokey, an automatic spam detector bot, detects just ab...

When viewing the homepage, I can see a spam post under Recently viewed posts. Admittedly, it was recently viewed, but considering I don't have 10k, it's not very useful to include it (well, yes, using metasmoke I can see it, but it still doesn't belong). Can deleted posts be removed from that li...

I can't see where this answer was spam or offensive and not sure why I failed the audit: https://stackoverflow.com/review/low-quality-posts/36699748

I just spent some time tracking down evidence that a poor quality old answer was not just poor quality, but also did not disclose that the author was involved with the solutions they recommended, as recommended in this meta post and required by the self-promotion standards. Then I looked up and n...

Staff recently replied in a way that implies to me that SE is not aware of the overall problem with spam, but especially the recent wave on Superuser. The only thing currently keeping up the appearance of are user like cow who exhausted the 100 flag limit and the sophisticated tools users made. ...

Sometimes, I see spam/vandalism edit suggestions, but the post could use other improvements too, so I sometimes Reject and Edit them. This also serves to unilaterally reject the edit if there are no other reject votes, and prevent the rejection from ever being (wrongly) overturned. However, when ...

Given the recent and ongoing increase in spam, spam tends to stick around for longer during low activity time: To combat this, I suggest (temporary, at least) decreasing the flags needed on a single post from 4 to 3. If anyone wants to help with the spam, there is a chat regarding spam accounts...

SU currently is getting many spams. Can the max number of daily raised flags be increased, at least temporarily?

Given SU current spam wave, I have once again exhausted my available flags. Annoying, but got me thinking: Why not make a badge (or more) for it? It could motivate a certain type of users to flag more. In order to avoid nonsensical flags, I would make add the condition that all flags have to be h...

I noticed this morning that spams have come back to discussions: https://stackoverflow.com/beta/discussions/79399716/which-is-the-best-erp-software-for-small-business https://stackoverflow.com/beta/discussions/79399612/apple-vs-samsungs-slim-phone less likely to be spam, more like a soft promot...

A fairly major current issue is the quantity of spam. While my current combination of tools, both formal and informal mostly hold up well, I wonder if we can do better. In a sense - SD's RSS feeds and my site's informal chatroom based reporting for spam, but i feel like a proper queue might be a ...

Given that in recent times, spam comes in waves, it is useful to be able to quickly report/get rid of spam posts. For that, I propose that the UI be changed, so that flags for spam (and perhaps moderator attention) can be cast without having to open the individual posts. That should save some tim...

With the current increase in spam across the network, especially the past 48-60 hours, I’ve managed to exhaust my 100 flags on Super User, not only once, but twice. I don’t think Stack Exchange was designed to handle the increase of spam we’ve been seeing in 2024 and is continuing in 2025. I do a...

About a month ago I followed some companies at stackoverflow.com/jobs/companies because I was curious about the updates they'd post. As a result I started receiving weekly emails with "New activity from companies you follow". After receiving the email last week, I decided I didn't want to keep ge...

While I’m sure that this tactic isn’t new, I have noticed that of late, there has been an increase in the amount of spam that is attempted to be edited into legitimate posts. (I have no hard, cold facts to support this claim, however I’m sure I’m not the only one who agrees.) I say attempted, bec...

In recent days, Super User has been hit by a large amount of spam. The spam flag rate-limiting timer is hindering our ability to deal with the spam in a timely manner. Given the current context, would it be possible to reduce or remove the spam flag rate-limiting timer on a trial basis for commu...

Stack Exchange is currently running an experimental bot called AnswerBot. They have stated they are running it on Webapps and it now appears to be running on Crafts as well. The bot, for now, is not actually showing it posts to regular users, just moderators as a sample test. For some reason, lik...

From time to time I see users with name "Spammer". One of the recent examples would be https://stackoverflow.com/users/19197407/spammer. And so far in my observation, they do spam. I don't think any "normal" user would use "spammer" as their username. So is there any deal with the name? Maybe som...

This answer to an older question is at the moment in the "first answers" queue: You're not the first, and you certainly won't be the last to explore this area. Nowadays, there are plenty of tools available for extracting data from graphs. Recently, my choice has fallen on https://splinecloud.com...

Sometimes SE recieves spam in foreign languages like this (scroll down to see). Why they don't care?

I recently flagged a post using a custom flag to show undisclosed affiliation, and it was declined. In the flag message, I said Undisclosed affiliation. See medium.com/@skpcsmtp, showing "vvcares" with similar username. The response was Having a Medium Blog is not an affiliation. Medium is a b...

On most Stack Exchange sites, not only do spammer's posts get deleted, their accounts do, too. One example of this is SuperUser's Spammer Cannery, a chat room I participate in, that is dedicated to reporting spammer accounts, who receive an account deletion effective-immediately. I am well aware...

I'm doing some research about Prometheus setup these days, and something very much annoying and frustrating is happening to me. On lots of posts and questions on stackoverflow and other places like Reddit, I'm facing some answers that is shamelessly promoting VictoriaMetrics. This promotion is us...

Discussions has got a lot of attention recently, none of it good. The volume of spam in the area is at an all time high, which isn't disappearing quickly due to the lack of the usual tools. This is compounded by the tiny volume of good quality posts in Discussions (the last "good" was created on ...

I am writing in reference to a situation where a user posted a question referring to mine, shown here. However their account was destroyed (possibly for spam), so they posted again here. Their second account was also destroyed, but my question is, if their original question is not spam then why s...

A moderator reminded me in SOCVR about the fact that they are not obligated to moderate content in discussions, as quoted from here, All Stack Overflow site moderators also have access to all Discussions moderation functions, and are welcome to moderate as they see fit, but are not obligated to ...

Based on this question,- Why do we move? [closed], which shows that some questions can be so poorly formatted that they will have almost $99\%$ chances to be closed as off-topic for many reasons. Analyzing such questions for Physics SE community is a completely redundant/irrelevant when time spen...

The whole first page, and likely many more, is 100% spam. Can we have moderator/community manager intervention?

The fake support number spammers have turned their eye to https://salesforce.stackexchange.com/ and the site is being hammered with multiple spam posts per hour since several days back. What is this and what can be done about it?

There were a few occasions where askers weren't able to include details in their questions because the system blocked their post due to "spam". Examples: Here, the system seems to prevent codeblocks without links or images In this example, the author was blocked from adding some things but they ...

In recent weeks, I observed a steady stream of spam in discussions. To name a few, https://stackoverflow.com/beta/discussions/79012049/how-can-i-get-a-refund-from-makemytrip https://stackoverflow.com/beta/discussions/79004716/psychic-27780802727-powerful-revenge-spells-bring-back-lost-lover-spel...

I've been reading a lot of answers about how to react to AI-generated responses. There is one particular case, a user who answers based on AI and gives credit to the source of the answer. So far, everything is "correct", even though it is quite discouraging for regular users of the site: this use...

I got an email inviting me to a study as it appears I set the settings for it. However I am skeptical to its realness as: All links do not point to a SO/SE site, but instead to a cryptic link for a site called "pstmrk" and "rallyuxr". There is a monetary incentive given (with an asterisk going n...

When a post on the Staging Ground is deleted, the comments underneath remain visible to users with the privileges to view deleted posts (I think 10k). This is unexpected and curious, but also, in the case of some recent spam posts, that leaves spam comments visible even after the spam post itself...

On Tuesday September 3rd, 2024, around 15:05 UTC, Github sent out email notifications to SmokeDetector and all users who had a fork of the repository, notifying us that it had been disabled because of an unspecified Terms of Service violation. We quickly filled in the appeal form (I did personall...

User Care Assure's profile description appears to be an ad for an Australian company involved in their National Disability Insurance Scheme. The profile was created within the last day; the only activity posted was a now deleted "answer" which was (quite likely AI-generated) badly formatted nonse...

I've been working on an application that sends transactional emails to users, but recently, many of these emails have been landing in the recipients' spam folders. Here are some details about my setup: Programming Language and Framework: Python with Django Email Sending Library: Using Django's bu...

The data dumps traditionally were primarily meant as an insurance policy against the company going rogue. Considering that the company 'now' sees the dumps as something they can turn into a product, and partially inspired by several conversations we've had I wonder if 'other' kinds of dumps other...

Frequently there are answers or questions on the site which are clearly created by non-human accounts. For example https://english.stackexchange.com/a/624403/418554 This is an "answer" to an 8 year old question by a new account with a full name and only a single post. This is very obviously not a...

I'm new to StackOverflow and would like to use it more, but I'm a little confused about the reputation system. Why do you need reputation to do things like comment or vote? It seems like a barrier to participation for new users. I understand wanting to prevent spam, but there must be a better way...

This question My key has been either jammed/ or got broken inside the lock, I tried multiple tricks to pull out the key, but none of the methods worked. Would appreciate any advice that can help me resolve my problem. Was flagged as spam: Our system has identified this post as possible spam; ...

Say one posts a question that includes some sample html: <p> <a href="mailto:&#115;&#97;&#108;&#101;&#115;&#64;&#101;&#120;&#97;&#109;&#112;&#108;&#101;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109;" >&#115;&#97;&#108;&#101;&#115;&#64;&#101;&#120;&#97;&#109;&#112;&#108;&#101;&#46;&#99;&#111;&#109; </a> </p>...

I ran across an obvious piece of spam in Staging Ground. I flagged it accordingly, but I still had the set of choices in the "Review Question" box. It clearly shouldn't be promoted to a "real" question, but I also don't want to spend lots of time in the UI just filtering this out. (I ultimately...

Right now the site is being flooded with posts from new users, with pseudonymous names, who use a mixture of obvious AI-generated nonsense mathematics and weird sentences (sometimes borderline offensive?) about things that have nothing at all to do with math (which are I would guess actually writ...