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Periodically, we get questions about what to do when someone vandalises their question, or even someone else's question. Here I have compiled a list of these questions so that this kind of question does not get asked again.

The list:

User defacing their question

What is the policy for users who deliberately vandalise their own posts?

Questions edited in such a way that they cannot be recognized

What can moderators do when a user defaces his/her own post?

Does that count as defacement?

On the response to self-vandalised questions

Vandalizing question posted by others

Also related:

Defacement/Censorship of peoples answers

Defacing a downclosed post

Why was my suggested edit rejected?

Is it within policy for instructors to edit post text to remove questions from active exams?

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2 Answers 2

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What should I do?

Firstly, flag for moderator attention. Flagging allows moderators to remove posts without raising the attention of the question-poster.

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Then you can rollback the unconstructive edit (if that hasn't already been done), and leave a polite comment that vandalism is frowned upon here. If that user reverts your rollback, flag it and move on: do not get into an edit war as the mods can handle it themselves.

In summary, just report it and move on. If anything is not clear in this post, please check out the list of posts above. Do not ask a new question as there are already enough duplicates.

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  • $\begingroup$ So you have to ask them to stop trolling first before reporting them, or do you only do that if youre nice and don't want them to be banned? $\endgroup$
    – Some Guy
    Commented Mar 21, 2021 at 20:42
  • $\begingroup$ If the post is vandalised, rollback to the latest clean edit. If they keep vandalising their post, it would be appropriate to flag. $\endgroup$
    – Toby Mak
    Commented Mar 21, 2021 at 22:31
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    $\begingroup$ Actually, in more than 90% of cases, these users will keep vandalising their question until some action is taken. Therefore, the best option is to flag immediately as these users are not respecting the rules of our site and abusing the privileges that have been given to them. Some vandalising edits are made in good faith: when a user does it to mark their question as answered, leave a comment explaining that accepting an answer is the right way to do this on our site. $\endgroup$
    – Toby Mak
    Commented Mar 22, 2021 at 11:43
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I have found a simpler solution: if you see a question about vandalism, just tag it: the tag is called . When you search for this tag, you will be able to find all related questions on one page.

When doing this, please be mindful to only tag a few questions at a time, as these older questions will get sent to the front page. Too much tagging clogs up the space on the front page, to the detriment of new questions which could be more important.

If you want to be notified when a new question is being tagged, click "Watch tag" like this:

enter preformatted text here

If you receive a notification about the tag, this will mean that the community is generally staying on top of this issue.

This strategy applies to other common duplicates as well.

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    $\begingroup$ Are you suggesting vandalised questions on main should be tagged with "vandalism" or that if somebody finds a question on meta about vandalism then this should be tagged? $\endgroup$
    – s.harp
    Commented Dec 23, 2020 at 13:17
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    $\begingroup$ If someone finds a question about vandalism, then this should be tagged. $\endgroup$
    – Toby Mak
    Commented Dec 24, 2020 at 0:56
  • $\begingroup$ The questions are on the main page as I have tagged them. $\endgroup$
    – Toby Mak
    Commented Dec 24, 2020 at 0:57

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