3. Autoflagging

In January 2017, we started automatically flagging spam through metasmoke. This page details that system.

What’s autoflagging?

Autoflagging is the subsystem of metasmoke that lets us automatically cast spam flags on posts that we’re confident are spam. Users sign up for their accounts to be added to a pool of available flags, which are used when spam comes in. We send up to 4 autoflags on a post, significantly reducing the number of spam flags humans need to raise to remove the post.

How accurate is it?

While SmokeDetector aims for zero false negatives, autoflagging aims for zero false positives. That is, SmokeDetector aims to catch all spam at the expense of a few caught legitimate posts; autoflagging aims to flag only spam without hitting any legitimate posts. Of course, neither of them hit their goals 100%; that’s to be expected. Autoflagging is, however, extremely accurate.

Users set up conditions that govern how confident they want to be that a post is spam before their account can be used to flag it. All conditions have to be more than 99.75% accurate before the system will accept them; the default recommended conditions are 100% accurate to the nearest 0.01%.

How can you sign up?

Make sure you have a metasmoke account. You can sign up for a metasmoke account here if you don’t already have an account. Authenticate using Stack Exchange so that we can associate your SE account with your MS account.

Visit the authentication page on metasmoke. If you’re happy with the disclaimer, click the Authenticate with Write Access button to get a write token for metasmoke to use.

Finally, visit the autoflagging wizard to set up your account for autoflagging. We recommend using the one-click setup wizard first, then customizing your settings later - that way, you know you’ve got valid settings.

You’re good to go! Flags will now be cast automatically in your name from metasmoke. If you’d like a report of what’s been flagged under your account, that’s also on metasmoke - from the flagging dashboard, click the link under Flagging & You.

Congrats, you’re done! The next two pages in the training guide give some detail about further privileges you can earn through contribution to Charcoal. Feel free to read those if you want to, but they’re not essential.

Next: Privileges

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