Should crazy bot-generated answers be flagged as spam?

Question

I just stumbled upon this answer:

Here is a link to the answer, though it has already been deleted: https://electronics.stackexchange.com/a/378755/91862

Now, I scratched my head a little before finally flagging as spam. Whenever I see stuff like this I assume that it is posted by a bot, with the goal of becoming "trusted" enough on the network to eventually be able to spam more efficiently.

However, as it stands it is obviously not spam. There's no product links, no products to sell, etc.

Should this be flagged as spam?

Answer 1

Since this is Meta, I suppose I could just add my reasoning as an answer for people to upvote and downvote at their leisure.

Yes, flag as spam

This is most likely written by a bot trying to build up reputation and credibility on the network. Even though this will never work well on the Stack Exchange network, they are bound to try.

Answer 2

It looks like quite some people disagree with my point of view, so I'll expand further.

It looks like spam, but it shouldn't be treated as spam

I assimilate these posts as intentional gibberish, which, according to the offical rules, should not be flagged as spam, but rather as "rude or abusive" (which works almost the same as the spam flag).

Excerpt of the official rules regarding "spam" flagging (emphasis mine):

A post should be marked as spam only if it advertises a product, service, or similar and is unsolicited or lacks disclosure.

It should not be marked as spam when

• The post contains no useful information, such as an answer that says “I don't care about your problem”. Flag as not an answer instead.
• It contains only gibberish, such as “fsdguejgkfdlk”. Use the rude or abusive flag for these cases.

And regarding the "rude or abusive" flag:

A post should be marked as rude or abusive (formerly known as offensive) if it contains hate speech, obscenities, abuse against people, or abuse of the community or system, i.e., a clear violation of the be-nice policy.

Abuse of the system or community is everything that is created with the intention to harm them. This includes posts that contain no useful content at all – i.e. gibberish posts along the lines of:

asdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasdasd

Both these flags work almost the same anyway, so it doesn't matter much. They will both lead to the post destruction, and a -100 rep penalty for the author (and potentially his permanent ban in the long run).

There are, however, two differences:

1. If a question gets two answers that are flagged as spam and deleted, it will be automatically protected. The same doesn't happen with rude or abusive flags.

2. If a post has helpful spam flags, then it can be used as an audit in review queues. If the post has only rude or abusive flags, then it won't be used.

This is where flagging as "rude or abusive" makes sense rather than "spam":

1. The gibberish posts are typically sent under random questions, so there is no reason to automatically protect such questions if they have been unlucky enough to get two gibberish posts as answer. On the other hand, real spam is typically sent to targeted questions, whose subject is more likley to attract spam (I have regularily seen spam posts from PCB fab houses on question about PCB manufacturing, for example). Automatically protecting these questions makes sense.

2. The gibberish posts are too easy to identify, so it does not make sense to reuse them for audits.

Answer 3

It's precursor spam. It is obviously nothing to do with electronics, and it isn't the sort of thing a newbie electronics person would post. It falls into the category of:

This user was created to post spam or nonsense and has no other positive participation

The user in this case has posted "spam or nonsense" and has no other positive participation.

Just flag it as spam, rather than making a flag that the moderators have to actually look at. Posts flagged as spam are automatically deleted once enough people flag them.

Answer 4

Yes, it is spam. It is a wall of gibberish, not parsed into paragraphs at all. Spelling is spot-on, which a bot can do with ease. But bots are not yet smart enough to understand proper English or American grammar, as in paragraphs, and where to put them.

We mildly chide those who post a question as a wall of text, but they usually have spelling or mild grammar mistakes as well.

This bot used perfect spelling, even with Unicode symbols, but did not understand parsing by context at all. Also all words begin with a capital letter, as this is a fine detail that takes foreigners years to learn. So by default it used capitals in many places we would not.

Answer 5

Googles definition of spam is pretty straightforward:

irrelevant or unsolicited messages sent over the Internet, typically to a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware, etc.

Any irrelevant message sent over the internet qualifies as spam. If the bots start posting coherent answers though.. I think there was an xkcd for that