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HN: How to get Spam posts deleted
3 points by Protophore 6485 days ago
I'm guessing that the "Public Liability Insurance Quotation" and the "Public Liability Insurance | Professional Indemnity Insurance" posts by "pmover" are spam. How can we get that junk deleted?
2 comments

A 1-week delay between creating accounts and being able to submit articles would knock this on the head.
An hour would be nearly as effective without being as obnoxious to legitimate traffic.
They can still comment, just not submit articles.
Users with a certain level or karma can flag posts and moderators can remove them.
However, there seems to be a shortage of moderators. I've flagged dozens of obvious spams and they're usually still around an hour or more later.
I think it works pretty well. They show up in "new" from time to time, I try to flag them when I see them and they disappear, never making it near the front page.

An hour or 2 seems an ok time for deletion right now because very few of those article are showing up each day. If the volume expands greatly, I'm sure they can work out a way that X number of flags will auto-delete.

However, there seems to be a shortage of moderators.

The number of moderators has recently been increased.

I think they're auto-killed at a certain number of flags, even without moderator intervention.