How should I respond to accusation of my answer being a spam, due to ignorance and laziness?

Question

I have recently written this answer that in my opinion provided a very concrete help with the OP's problem, based on the Stock Repair Option Strategy. None of numerous highly voted answers even remotely mentioned this useful idea that any serious investor should be aware of.

To my great surprise, my answer was accused to be a spam for providing a link to the relevant description page by Chicago Option Exchange, the world's major option exchange! Not only calling this link a spam makes absolutely no sense to me, but in contrast - this is the best and cleanest education source I've seen. In fact, I would challenge anyone to find a better source!

It is not like my answer consisted of that only link. With 8 written paragraphs I would say it was slightly more than that.

It is not like that link, if broken in the future, would reduce the quality of the answer. Any basic "googling" that broadly used term (Stock Repair Strategy) would provide sufficient information, even if not so clean and condensed.

It is not like my answer would improve a lot by copying any explanation to that broadly used strategy, for which there are numerous much better sources easily to be found. In contrast, my answer provided exactly the supplemental information.

The "arguments" as to why my answer was a spam I learned from the discussion were:

1. It was not clear how my answer was related to the question

2. I might be affiliated to the organisation linked

3. The essence of my answer is basically a complicated way of gambling

Now I have to ask:

Can these arguments be due to anything other than lack of basic knowledge plus lack of interest to learn about stock options, laziness to spend 1 min reading that page prominently explaining the reasons, and ignorance in general?

And - the main question - how should I respond to such judgemental accusations?

I have added that description as quote in my answer, which apparently was all the answer was missing. It is, however, so prominently displayed on the page linked or can be found by googling, that I have to say at the risk of repeating myself :) - basing any judgement on the lack of that can only be due to basic ignorance and laziness.

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EDIT.

I suppose what offended me was perceived lack of respect for the time it took me to write this relatively long answer. In my opinion, there is a big difference between posting a 1-2 sentence spam link and a longer answer with detailed explanation. I would challenge anyone to show me many true spam answers of that size! Even a single one :)

While I appreciate the annoyance of seeing spam, I consider myself capable of identifying and dismissing those without any moderator help. What appears spam to some, can be useful to others. And it something potentially useful was marked as spam and/or deleted by careless moderator, that effectively deprives all the community from that chance to learn something new and useful. Not mentioning the discouragement for the author to share further useful information.

There is a lot to lose for the community to mistakenly mark potentially useful answers as spam and I disagree with the attitude to take this lightly. There is much less harm simply doing nothing and leaving it at that.

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Now speaking about the CBOE site, it does indeed, unfortunately, has fair bit of advertising. However, I have to ask:

How much of a freeloader does one want to be? The fellas work hard to write a clean and simple presentation, nicely structured with useful examples! All given away for free! How else are they supposed to earn money?

So every site using 3rd party advertising is to be regarded as spam??? Are we not eliminating 99% of internet? :)

And further, those ads can actually be useful to some people! If not - why would anyone pay for them?

And in case of CBOE - at the risk of repeating myself, I have to insist that the page displays the core information as prominent as can only be possible. Despite of the 2 (admittedly annoying) ads, that information is in no way obscured. It takes under 30 seconds to read that useful information to decide if the page is useful!

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Another aspect that I find puzzling is how my answer is specific to the US options. Is it? Aren't options equally used everywhere?

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In my opinion, a less harmful approach from the side of the moderator, would be to raise a suitable question in the comments and give the author a chance to answer it, before mentioning any suspicion or accusation or anything negative whatsoever.

If you meet a person in a pub in a cozy environment and suspect he wants to sell you something - are you going to stand up and loudly announce your suspicion for everyone in the pub to know? I presume not. But what happened here is exactly that if you just think about it.

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Another thing I perceive as ignorance is calling an option strategy "gambling" for no mentioned reason. Are options gambling? Are stocks? Is this an opinion of a moderator in this forum?

I have further explored the site and found numerous high quality expert level discussions of options. It makes even me even more surprised to see a moderator calling a known proved option strategy, used by many traders, a "gambling".

Answer 1

Please don't be offended, and please don't consider a flag to be an accusation.

A combination of multiple factors that correlate with spammy behavior probably caused a user's spam alarm to fire a false-positive, and they raised a flag for a moderator.

Here are the factors that likely played a part in this:

1. It is a high-traffic page with >10,000 views. Such pages are often targeted by link spam.

2. You hadn't posted to the site before. Link spammers are almost always first-timers.

3. The link was to a domain not all would easily recognize as benign. Not everybody here is familiar with U.S. options trading. Though you and I might know exactly who the CBOE are, and their role in the options trading world, many more wouldn't.

4. Other than the link content itself, your answer text didn't mention the CBOE, who they are, or why you were linking to them. Link spam answers frequently link without explanation, too.

Answer 2

Firstly, apologies for not being aware that this was a standard reference source - we could have avoided a bit of discussion if I had realised that.

We get quite a lot of answers - maybe one or two a week - that make at least a vague attempt to be relevant but nonetheless appear to be spam/site promotion. In this case the flag stated:

Potential site promotion. It does not directly answer the question

When I respond to flags of that nature, I consider a few different factors in deciding how to proceed:

1. Does the link seem like spam?

   In this case the website actually looks quite spammy, with several adverts and lots of links to "Special offers". This is also a classic pattern of spam reference links where a site claims to be explaining some concept but is really just trying to sell something.

   Even after taking a much closer look now I still think the only thing that sets it apart from that is the CBOE name.

2. Relevance of the answer

   A lot of the answers that are really aimed at site promotion are peripherally relevant to the question but don't really make an attempt to address it directly.

   I thought that was true of your answer (pre-edit), and I still do. It's a well-established StackExchange policy that answers should make sense without following links or consulting external resources. There's also some guidance on this in the FAQ.

   As a reader, I want to know why the answer is worth considering before I click any external links or start searching the Internet. Without the introductory material you've now added, the answer seemed to me to be a random strategy for gambling on a stock price with no specific connection to the asker's original problem - by "gambling" I mean short-term speculation rather than investing or hedging.

   Certainly that judgement reflected my own ignorance of this particular option strategy, but I suspect that ignorance would be shared by the original question asker and many other users of the site.

   So as a moderator thinking about how relevant an answer it was, I was also judging it by those standards. That's not exactly laziness, though of course I do also limit the amount of work I do to handle each flag - I don't exhaustively research every possible avenue to understanding the post.

3. Status of the poster

   You were new to PF&M, which is the typical case for spam users. On the other hand, you did have an established account elsewhere on the StackExchange network, which somewhat negated this factor.

Overall I thought it probably wasn't spam, but I wasn't entirely sure, so I left the answer up and added a comment briefly summarising the above opinions so I could gather more information:

Could you explain a bit more about what this has to do with the OP's specific problem? Also, do you have any connection to the site you've linked to? At present the answer gives the impression of being spam/promotion.

I'm sorry if my comment came across as an attack, which wasn't my intention - I just wanted to explain how your post was being perceived by others. As I told the flagger, my plan was:

I've left a comment asking for clarification, but I can't see any obvious connection between the poster and the site, so I'll leave it up for now.

If you hadn't responded to the comment I'd probably still have left your answer up, but also left my comment as a warning to other users to treat it carefully. As it was, the very fact that you bothered to respond made me pretty confident that there wasn't any problem, and I deleted the comment as planned after a bit more follow-up discussion.

In much more extreme cases (e.g. affiliate links, or completely off-topic material) I would typically delete at that stage - with the possibility of undeleting later if the initial judgement did turn out to be wrong.

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So, to answer your actual question, the simple way to respond to an "accusation" of spamming is just to engage with the person asking. If we bother to ask then we are at least open to the idea that there's a good explanation. Any kind of reply at all sets you apart from the typical "drive-by".

Also, for you personally, the next time you post you won't be a completely new user so it's even less likely that any moderator would think you were spamming.

Answer 3

The answer is we are all human and subject to mistakes. A link to a CBOE article should not have been considered spam. The mod handling it is new, not in the US, and I'm guessing, not familiar with options trading.

You handled it just fine. Your answer is re-opened, and the comments all cleared now. Please accept my apologies.