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An advertisement was posted on the site. I posted an answer:

Please do not advertise here, this is a place for asking questions and answering them.

Would this be allowed? (To protect my reputation from any downvotes, I made it a community wiki.)

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    Please don’t use the ”Post Your Answer” button to submit content which does not attempt to answer the question at the top of the page. If you wish to provide guidance for how to use the site, maybe post a comment.
    – tripleee
    Mar 4 at 18:32
  • @tripleee But the ‘question’ wasn’t a question.
    – The Empty String Photographer
    Mar 5 at 9:14
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    Still, your "answer" was not an answer. You need 50 reputation to post a comment, but that just means it's probably better to let someone who has that privelege do it, if indeed it seems useful. Most spam is hit-and-run anyway, so the spammer is somewhat unlikely to return and see your gripe.
    – tripleee
    Mar 5 at 10:14

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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You're right; that question does not belong on the site at all. The best course of action is to flag it as spam; you can do so because you have more than 15 reputation. Six of such flags (or one by a ♦ moderator) removes it from the site and makes sure the user can't post for a while. There's also a network-wide community project to detect (and even automatically flag) spam posts, and since it's rather obvious spam, it was indeed detected and received three automatic flags. Two users flagged it manually, before a ♦ moderator cast the final flag (but that would be number six, so anyone could have done so). It was deleted less than a quarter of an hour after posting; pretty efficient if you ask me.

Posting an answer, like you did, doesn't really help fighting spam, even though your intention is good! Luckily, we have better measures than most other Internet sites.

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  • yh i did flag it
    – The Empty String Photographer
    Mar 4 at 17:30
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    I can see that (thanks!), but I'm not allowed to disclose that information :) I'm just informing you that posting an answer is not necessary. I see a lot of spam on the network (because I'm a Charcoal member) and do see quite a few comments saying something is spam, but unless it's not obvious from the post itself, those are superfluous as well. (And TBH, sometimes I can't resist reacting on the spam in a funny way ...)
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Mar 4 at 17:32
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    It turns out that SmokeDetector managed to detect this as spam!
    – The Empty String Photographer
    Mar 5 at 14:19

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