My Q&A got marked as spam, deleted and lost 100+ points

Question

I made a big effort into creating some ESRI Error lookup code, I thought it would be a great idea to share it with the community. After posting it on github, I created a Q&A here which linked to it and I explained how it worked etc. Unfortunate I marked my answer as community wiki, I could not undo it so i flagged the thread and asked if it could be changed.

An hour later everything was deleted and i had lost 100+ rep points. I tried to find out why this had happened and just found out that it was marked as spam. I have no idea what so ever why, and think that I have been treated really poor here.

Punishing me for trying to contribute to the community in such a harsh way and to such a length, doesn't make me want to contribute in the future.

My Question and Answer had also gotten upvotes and been commented as "good work!"

I don't know if you guys can see the deleted post with the provided link bellow

ESRI Error Lookup COMException

Answer 1

The post was deleted due to spam flags, I've restored it as you've indicated that you'd like to edit it, so you should have a chance to do so.

If your trying to share knowledge in the form of asking and answering your own question, that's fine, but when the question and answer both feel like they're somewhat of an advertisement, eyebrows are often raised. Stack Exchange communities as a whole are very sensitive to this sort of thing because so much of it each day is rather questionable.

I think you're just trying to share something useful, however you do need to edit your answer to talk more about how the code works, and reiterate that it's a gist which people can freely use if they find it to be useful.

I edited the question to be a little less leading.

Note, the post is restored, and I removed the wiki status, however it remains on hold until you've edited the answer a bit. Once you have it will go into the reopen queue, and you can also flag for moderator attention.

It's sometimes terribly difficult to distinguish malice from benign behavior when the patterns match so closely, but I do believe that you had honest intentions here.

Answer 2

I was one (the only one?) of the users who flagged the post, and I think that I owe you an explanation.

I flagged it for moderator attention, because I felt something was amiss and weird.

• Firstly the body of the question wasn't a real question. There is no question that I could decipher. Saying

Have you ever ripped your hair out of pain and agony of the annoying and impossible error codes or error messages received from the exceptions?

feels more like a rant, rather than a question.

• Secondly, The answer you have posted, feels like it is promoting your Gist/Github Page. It really doesn't provide any insight into the problem with error codes. There are many solutions to getting the real exception from COMexceptions, such as given here and here. IMHO, Your answer does not really help or provide a solution.

• Thirdly, the other answer on your question also felt fishy. Rather than commenting on your answer, that was posted as a new answer. This felt like a sock-puppet account to me. I'm not saying it is, but I felt it could be.

This is why I flagged the question, so that the moderators could have a look at it with the tools that they have, so that they can see if something is wrong.

I'm not convinced that it is spam, and I disagree with it being marked as spam. I only felt that it was not a good Question and Answer.

Answer 3

It came to my attention because another user had flagged it as suspicious - looking at the "question" it was clearly not a question but an advert for some code. Looks like spam to me so I flagged it as such.

This site works by people asking questions and other (or the same) people posting answers not as a blogging host.