While reviewing low-quality posts, I was shown this answer:

I was about to click "Skip" but then hesitantly changed my mind and decided it "Looks OK", borderline. Turns out it was an audit, and I failed the audit.

I'm a bit divided here. The answer is not a link-only answer because (to my limited understanding) it tries to explain what happened and how to solve it.

Looking back now, to me, it's not altogether different from some of the other answers to the question

Also, the feedback I got seemed a bit over the top.

STOP! Look and Listen.

This was an audit, designed to see if you were paying attention. You didn't pass. This post has severe quality issues. It is abusive nonsense, noise, spam, blatantly off-topic or otherwise irredeemable – readers will find it offensive or repulsive rather than helpful. Please delete or recommend deletion when reviewing such posts.

As far as I can understand what happened, the audit simply picks out questions which have been closed in the past (by unanimous vote? Do we get details about how this works?) and I just got a bit unlucky and got served an answer which perhaps should not have been closed.

Is this analysis correct?

If so, is there something that could be done to prevent this from happening again? Like, for example, apply stricter criteria to which answers get picked as audit tests?

If not, should I be much more careful, and skip the vast majority of reviews?

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    Not really sure how to tag this either. Feedback welcome. – tripleee Aug 26 '14 at 8:50
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    I usually proceed by smashing and throwing things. Your mileage may vary. – Cody Gray Mod Aug 26 '14 at 8:53
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    That answer was advertising a commercial database repair tool. It effectively amounted to run the install program, use that tool if it doesn't work. – Frédéric Hamidi Aug 26 '14 at 8:54
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    user3829088 appears to be gone. Is that an important clue? How would I find the reason for closing after the fact? The link looks innocuous to me -- would the answer be acceptable (in isolation) if it stressed that this is a commercial tool and/or the poster is affiliated with the vendor? – tripleee Aug 26 '14 at 9:02
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    The account of the user who posted that answer was destroyed, taking their answers with it. Clearly they were identified by a moderator as a spammer. Probably yes, the answer would be okay if either/both (A) posted in isolation rather than en masse to a bunch of questions, (B) it properly disclosed his/her affiliation. – Cody Gray Mod Aug 26 '14 at 9:34
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    @gnat uh, those are clearly machine-generated. This was marginally on-topic and contained text written by a human (albeit closer inspection suggests it may have been lifted from the blog entry they linked to). – tripleee Aug 26 '14 at 11:02
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    So is a possible conclusion that spam answers should not be used as audit tests because they might be acceptable outside of the spam context? – tripleee Aug 26 '14 at 11:03
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    "Learn to love that Skip button." – gnat Aug 26 '14 at 11:18
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    The Fix™ – Braiam Aug 27 '14 at 1:46
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    Not sure about the content, but there is obvious sentence structure issues with that audit anyway. I would have suggested an edit for clarity if anything. – Rich Scriven Aug 27 '14 at 2:05

That's spam. I flagged it, and I destroyed that user. This is related to this other review case.

When reviewing, you need to read the entire answer, not just the first few paragraphs. An answer by a brand new user that contains a paragraph like:

If still it does make your database accessible then you need to take help of SQL Repair Tool. It is powerful recovery tool effectively retrieves your new data and scans the damaged database file and repairs it to recover inaccessible objects in MDF and NDF database files.

speaking glowingly about a commercial product, followed by a link to the site containing said commercial product, should throw up a red flag. Even if you don't feel comfortable with a full spam flag, your first instinct on seeing something like that should be to provide moderators with an "other" flag explaining that this looks pretty shady. We can dig into it to see if there is something more going on here.

This is part of a highly coordinated spam ring that has been attacking Stack Overflow, Super User, Server Fault, and other Stack Exchange networks with spam for their various commercial products over the last couple of months. All of these products have something to do with account or data recovery, so they are posting spam answers to questions that have something to do with this.

At first, their answers consisted only of links to their tools. Those were mostly caught in review or otherwise flagged and deleted as spam. They then evolved to leaving longer answers that look like they have sensible text at the beginning (often plagiarized from other SO answers or outside blog posts), with advertising text and links added at the end. These are now getting approved by reviewers most of the time, letting their spam onto the site. As a further evolution of this (seen in that linked Meta post), they are now creating throwaway accounts to ask softball (and completely off topic) questions on various sites that they can provide their spam answers to. Almost all of these question / answer pairs are being approved here on SO, although the reviewers at Super User and Server Fault seem to be a little more discriminating in what they let through.

I have personally destroyed maybe 60 of their accounts in the past few weeks, yet they keep coming. I'm hoping that spam-flagged posts like this as audit cases will train reviewers to be a little more suspicious of promotional answers in this style and reduce the rate at which they are being approved. They are not the only spammers finding that padding their spam with a little legitimate-sounding text at the beginning is helping them fool reviewers, and it seems to be growing more prevalent over time.

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    Thanks for the answer. So how could a reviewer hope to uncover the truth without access to the evidence? Hmmm, maybe a topic for a follow-up question. – tripleee Aug 26 '14 at 16:14
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    @tripleee - While you wouldn't have seen the broader picture of these users, a brand new user posting an answer promoting a commercial product (as they did here) should make you very skeptical. At that point, it's best to flag a promotional answer like this for further review. Moderators can look into it after that point. Occasionally you do find a brand-new user providing legitimate answers praising a commercial product, but more frequently it turns out to be spam. – Brad Larson Mod Aug 26 '14 at 18:29
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    "I'm hoping that spam-flagged posts like this as audit cases will train reviewers to be a little more suspicious of promotional answers in this style" the low quality review queue seems to be a poor selection to do this, since they don't have way to flag it as spam. First post and Late Answers should be the solution. – Braiam Aug 27 '14 at 1:47

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