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I refer to this question: How to make custom Cards Against Humanity Cards?

It's a really good question to ask! It has some totally valid answers too: alterations, use the actual blank cards coming out with recent packs, use a print service.

That last one is a problem though: four of these answers (1 2 3 4) are just promoting an online printing service. Three of these (all but #1) are from users otherwise totally inactive on our network, which is really concerning: this question's becoming a spam repository.

What should we do?

I feel like protecting the question won't be quite enough, because it will still be open up to arbitrary "here, use this printing service" responses as in #1.

3 Answers 3

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I have protected the question. That will stop new users from adding answers, which should deal with most of the problem you're seeing.

Besides that, if you think an answer is spam, flag it as spam. That's what the spam flag is for.

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This is exactly one of the things protection is meant for. Protecting the question means that if someone wants to post a link to promote their printing service, they have to post a good question or good answer elsewhere first. But blatant spammers tend to have a "quantity over quality" mentality; they want to plaster their links as many places as possible without investing time and effort, since that's how they make a profit. It's not worth their time to come up with another good question or answer, post it, and wait to accumulate 10 rep.

If someone who does have 10 rep on this site posts an answer that seems to be purely promotional, well, perhaps they are just recommending a service that they've found to be useful. Perhaps not. But they do have at least a slight posting history that you can use to help you make that judgement.

Another thing you can do is (get a moderator to) add the "insufficient explanation" post notice, which says that answerers are expected to include some detail in their answers, not just post a link. It also needs to be enforced through aggressive flagging and deletion of link-only answers. If that happens, it further raises the bar for spammers. I think your spam problem would pretty much disappear at that point.

Honestly, though, I wonder whether questions like this, which can be effectively answered with just a link, are really a good idea on SE. The vote totals on answers are rather meaningless for such questions. But that's a separate issue.

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A high rep member protected the question, meaning that people with less than 10 rep on the site can no longer answer it.

Unfortunately, some of the "spam" answers were upvoted, meaning that those people with 21 rep can now answer other "protected" questions.

There was no reason for people with more than 25 rep to upvote the bad answers.

Instead, people should flag for moderator attention as soon as the first spam answer is posted.

The system "works," we just need to be more alert, and "quicker on the draw."

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