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The spam flag is indeed intended only for promotional posts that have very little to do with the topic at hand. However, utterly meaningless gibberish may well be flagged as rude or abusive. The flag description says A reasonable person would find this content inappropriate for respectful discourse and posting something completely devoid of meaning is ...

Is this OK with you, having reputable physicists (like Cosmas Zachos and Valter Moretti or Urs Schreiber to name a few) alongside crackpots? That's the wrong question. Let's suppose I'm not "OK" with that. What can we do? By SE policy (cf. e.g. this and this), you can pretty much link to anything you want in your profile as long as it's not egregious hate ...

Users are allowed to put what they want in their user profiles, within reason. Generally speaking, users are allowed to put whatever the heck they want in their user profile. This includes links, images, text... as long as they stick with two guidelines: It should be SFW, and has to be non-offensive to people. This means: No naked pictures, but a picture of ...

You can put whatever you want in your profile. (barring NSFW or generally offensive material, though the rules are pretty lax on that too) Sure, feel free to link to Quora there :)

Discussions on meta Stack Exchange sites are discussions, but they are still expected to have some structure. If you post an answer, then just as on the main site, it is expected to address the question itself, not another post. If your answer is not an answer, it may be deleted, as per site policy. It is also possible that a moderator with convert the ...

Note that "spam" is notably missing from the list of flags (VLQ, rude or abusive, not an answer) Shog9 lists in the answer you quote. The spam flag description reads: Exists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the author's affiliation. A gibberish post does not, by any reasonable interpretation, qualify as promoting anything, ...

That is not spam. On StackExchange, only posts that explicity advertise a specific website, program or product are considered spam. Gibberish should be flagged as either "not an answer" or "rude or abusive".

There already is a feature like this, known as blacklisting (not available to mods). SE has been notified, they're trying to deal with it.

The description of the spam flag is Exists only to promote a product or service, does not disclose the author's affiliation. In this case, the answer does appear to legitimately (note I'm not saying "correctly") address the question, so it doesn't exist only to promote a product or service. There also doesn't seem to be any sign that the author of the ...

To expand on what Manishearth said and address the last part of the question: the guidelines on what constitutes excessive self-promotion are outlined in the help center. Avoid overt self-promotion. The community tends to vote down overt self-promotion and flag it as spam. Post good, relevant answers, and if some (but not all) happen to be about your ...

I'm not going to bother going over the SE network policy on profiles again, since two answers already have. Is this OK with you, having reputable physicists (like Cosmas Zachos and Valter Moretti or Urs Schreiber to name a few) alongside crackpots? What's your criteria for judging this? It's entirely possible someone believes in some non-stream ideas; ...

to me it seems to have been posted with the only objective of, without disclosure, advertising. Isn't it spam? No. David Z's answer is correct, and I'd add two remarks: the post in point addresses the question and consequently doesn't strictly fit the definition of spam, but, it's still likely to have been spam in spirit, that "legally" made use of the (...