Thanks, but I have a flag link. Maybe I don't have enough Karma. And I cant see the logic behind not letting low karma users flag spam.
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As I recall, you need 50 karma to flag items. The logic behind this is preventing bunches of new users from flooding the site and knocking off all of the new articles - as with 10 flags, an article under 10 points is auto-killed, or something like that. Giving trolls the ability to easily do that could be pretty bad.
Surely a parallel heuristic could be used. Enabling users without enough Karma flag, but counting for far less towards the auto-kill feature, or even just notifying people that it might be spam.
Clearly the process needs to be streamlined. This spam story has been live for over an hour.
Yeah, probably. Would take more effort to get balanced, though, and using an equation to see how much it's counted for would make the code more complex, and harder to modify on the fly. It's not uncommon for spam to be alive for a while either - check /noobstories sometimes, stuff stays alive for a while. I suspect that most of the dead articles are killed by filters, looking at what dies and what stays alive. Doesn't much matter as long as it isn't upvoted, I think - the links have rel="nofollow", or at least this one does, so no pagerank is going to the spam site, and almost everyone here is savvy enough to recognize spam.
But hey, I'm just one user; if you want the opinion of the community, submit an ask hn about it, and see what the community thinks. Or go out on a limb and write a patch which would enable it, and see if pg accepts it.