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I was looking around on various meta sites today, and I would like to share this link with you:

https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/327636/educating-people-to-flag-spam-and-not-vote-to-close?cb=1

I would like your opinions on this question.

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    It's not possible to see close votes for regular users, but perhaps moderators can see who's votes are those. Mods could contact those individuals and just leave them a brief comment, but that's about it, as far as I can see it Jul 14, 2016 at 4:04
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    I have never notice spam being VTC'ed here, I am sure it has happened but spam is dealt with so fast here that it seems irrelevant. It might be a problem at stack overflow but here, it is almost like a game for users to flag spam as quick as possible.
    – Mark Kirby
    Jul 14, 2016 at 7:51
  • Hmm. That is true, but recently a question about Should I shave my beard was closed for about a week before being deleted.
    – fosslinux
    Aug 3, 2016 at 2:23

2 Answers 2

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It is of course true that spam posts should be flagged, instead of consuming reviewer's time in the close review. In practice however, enough people do flag spam. In many cases, It even is a sport to be in time to flag the question before it is deleted or locked.

People are simply too fast here to let spam posts survive until the first reviewer would possibly waste his or her time on them. Not a real problem currently.


I was too slow again :)

enter image description here

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  • Might be a good idea to blank out there url. Up to you but we don't want to give them any free traffic from here :)
    – Mark Kirby
    Jul 14, 2016 at 11:58
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    @MarkKirby done! although it is an image- url, no textual :) Jul 14, 2016 at 11:59
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    I love the way these spam messages seem to try so hard to get around filters that they end up making no sense. Jul 16, 2016 at 21:46
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    "Would youn't need skin?" nope
    – cat
    Jul 17, 2016 at 11:59
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You don't educate people. You educate as many people as possible.

Even in real life, even if 99% of the class get an A, one will fail it.

On a website that has millions of users, there will be few people ignoring the post, others voting to close but what's important is that the vast majority will flag it. If the website has only few hundred users, then yes this would be a problem, but when you have millions of users, seeing 1 or 2 or 3 close votes, it's not even 0.1% of the users.

Besides most of the people who needs education, don't bother visiting meta to read the rules, new posts and get "educated". Come one this crap which is far crappier than all the spam posts on SE ever still got 591,061 likes as of today, you still want to educate people? judging by numbers, i think SE community is well educated when compared to youtube.

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    I know some people think posting on meta (in general) is useless to educate (new?) users. I strongly disagree, I am pretty sure many newcomers and users in general achieve a lot of information from meta. I did for one thing. Furthermore, people who take the effort to close-vote on spam obviously do care. They only don't have the right understanding. It just is not an issue at this moment. Jul 17, 2016 at 15:23

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