I recently flagged these three answers as spam because they
- Linked directly to a specific product/site/etc
- Provided a link but didn't give much (or any) explanatory context to answer the question
- Didn't address the question being asked (simply assumed an answer of "use Lua instead of Java" and provided links to tools to do so)
- The users who posted the answers had no other activity on the site, or their name was non-linked and I could not find such information (and assumed that to be the case)
Since one of the flags was marked helpful, and the answer wasn't deleted, I did some searching and found out how spam flags are handled. It seems that 3 flags are required to remove the post from the front page (completely irrelevant at this point), and 6 are required to delete the post. These flags all must come within 48 hours, or the flag count is reset. Considering the newest of these three answers has been around for 7 months, and traffic on GameDev.StackExchange seems to be lighter than StackOverflow, I don't expect these posts to get the required 6 flags for deletion within the 48 hour window. Will they be left there to plug their link (2 of the 3 linked to the same thing) simply because not enough people flagged them at the same time? Or is there another course of action that can be taken?