I had Spelt Chex for breakfast this morning.
They weren’t very good…
My rule of thumb is that I’ll announce when it’s obvious that it was spam that I reported. In other cases, I tend to view an announcement as a form of junior modding, so I’m more circumspect, even if the report was for something like a longer C&P than Fair Use would allow for.
Big thanks to everyone who reported spam over the years, but I’m pretty sure the additional reply is no longer necessary after the migration to the new forum software circa late summer 2020.
That being said, definitely 
flag anything that looks spammy to your eye.
Does Discourse merge multiple reports together, then sort by number? Ideally, mods wouldn’t get spammed by zillions of the same report, but at the same time a multiple-reported post should probably percolate to the top of the stack as it’s more likely to be real and potentially urgent.
This thread answers that, I think, among others. Short answer 10 flags = one report to the mods but will show all flags listed. It doesn’t sound like there is enough reports to worry about getting lost in the shuffle.
Weird posting to a six year old thread, I wonder if codinghorror deleted spam there.
Does that come from on high (i.e. the mods)? I would prefer a mod step in and tell us, since it’s essentially telling us how we should post. I’m find if they agree, but I conceivably could not. For example, if reporting still gives mods a bunch of notifications, they may still prefer not having the same post reported too many times.
And I hope @modecaiB is wrong (or I’m misunderstanding them). It would suck if mods only received reports if something was flagged 10 times. That said, I don’t see any such claim in the thread they linked.
I don’t think mordecaiB meant that there was any numeric threshold, just that all flags get lumped together into one report, whatever the number might be. I see from the other thread that it may not even be possible to reach 10 reports before the post is hidden (though I wonder if there’s any other logic, like accounting for timespan or number of users or the like).
Dr.Strangelove is correct. I meant no matter how many flags a post gets, mods get one report but if they want they can see all the flags the report contains.
If a post is flagged 7 times, we see 7 flags listed for 1 flagged post. Though as the post is hidden on the 3rd flag (I think) we never see 7 flags.
As always I ask posters that flag to please use “Something Else” or the “Spam” flags depending on what it is. The “Something Else” lets you explain what is wrong with the post you’re reporting which lets the mods have a better chance to moderate. Someday we’ll get those other 2 flags removed or have their text changed.
Thank you,
Jim
I don’t think it’s necessary any more to post “spam reported” after you flag a post. Since all the reports of a single post are consolidated, and the post gets hidden after a few flags, we don’t get an excessive number of reports. With vBulletin it was a problem since we might get many independent notifications of the same post.
It was helpful (and still remains helpful from a historical “oops we forgot to clean up that old spam” angle) but it should not be necessary to post “spam reported!” replies since the migration to the new software.
Just mash the button (as necessary) and you’re golden!