

Ask PG: Comment Spam - ZenJosh

Over the past couple of days I've noticed an increasing trend of users posting "&#60;subject of post&#62; is becoming more and more of a problem, luckily, my startup 'X-Co' solves this problem, here's a link to our website" comments on vaguely related and completely unrelated posts. Is it time HN implemented a flag button for comments or would you class these as acceptable comments?
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tokenadult
_Is it time HN implemented a flag button for comments_

Hacker News implemented a flag button for comments quite a while ago. You go
the "link" next to the comment header, to go directly to the URL of the
comment, and then a "flag" link will be exposed there if you have enough karma
to flag. I flag comments from time to time if they meet criteria laid out by
pg last year

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2403696>

when he wrote, "The problem has several components: comments that are (a) mean
and/or (b) dumb that (c) get massively upvoted."

A comment being mean is a signal that the comment may be silently downloaded
(and flagged as well) and a comment being dumb is at least a signal for a
downvote (although in some threads I don't know what is dumb and what is
smart, for lack of personal knowledge, so I hope other people pitch in those
threads) and possibly a signal for flagging. A comment that is BOTH mean and
dumb definitely deserves user response to eliminate it. Comments that appear
to be spam (what you are specifically asking about) are also against the
community culture here, and I would flag those and downvote those when I see
them (but I haven't seen a lot of comments like those lately).

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staunch
Plugs from _founders_ seems to me completely in line with what HN is all
about. Heck, the whole site is in part a plug for YC. This is a total non
problem.

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mooism2
HN has a flag link for comments, but you have to follow the link link first in
order to see it.

------
pg
Examples?

~~~
staunch
Pretty sure this is one that sparked the issue
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4443320>

~~~
pg
That's harmless.

