I’m starting to notice spam accounts here — accounts that do nothing but post and crosspost links to low-quality or promotional websites.
My inclination is to simply downvote and report each spam post, but this maybe generates a lot of mod queue activity for community moderators. And when an account is used for nothing but spam, presumably that would be better handled by admins banning the account than by each community moderator needing to respond individually to each spam post.
And maybe by the time mods or admins get around to looking at the reports, they’ve already noticed the spam and responded to it directly.
So — if you’re a community moderator or an instance admin, what are your preferences for receiving reports of spam accounts? Is it worth it to you to get reports of spam posts, or messages pointing out a spammer account, or would you prefer that we just downvote, block, and move on?
There are spam accounts already today. It’s not a theoretical question. I’ve run Internet services before and done anti-spam work for them. I already know the theory; what I want to know is what helps the actual people who are doing the actual work on this service here.