About flagging and community moderation

Question

Our site is growing. And a result of that increased traffic is an increase in spam and new users who don't know the rules. I find it hard to complain about theses taxes on our success as a community.

BUT it is time to remind our community how the flagging and moderation should work, from a community perspective.

The StackExchange software is designed to allow the community to do most of the work, and mods should only be involved for special issues. It isn't the mods being lazy, it is acknowledging that the community controls the site, not the mods. ( Although lazy isn't totally off the table )

Answer 1

Use flags by their intent:

Why are the moderators being so strict with quality related flags recently?

Flagging a post for moderator review

What are the “spam” and “rude or abusive” (offensive) flags, and how do they work?

If you flag a spam post, use the spam flag and not moderator attention. A mod can certainly delete the content, but the community might very well get enough spam flags to remove the content before a mod returns to the site.

Answer 2

Try to fix content that is salvageable

Some folks will post a kernel of a good idea and let it die. Maybe some "SEO" expert will answer with good information, but ruin it with a link back to their site, i.e. making the point of the post promotional.

Instead of voting to close and removing content that will make the Internet better, fix the post. Add better references, clarify poorly worded sentences.

I am not suggesting you edit the post to change the nature of the question or answer, and I am not saying delete is a bad option for some content; I am saying see if you can fix it before you delete it.