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Where do the ToS draw the line regarding what a spam account is?
The general policy on spam accounts with advertisements stored in their user profile (and no account activity) was already discussed here.
I´m looking at an account whose current advertisement method within our network is literally their distinct account name only.
To gain search engine attention, this account would also sometimes post a low quality [also plagiarized, but please let's pretend, for the sake of this policy question, that this is not always the case] answer, sometimes without even checking whether the victim question did not already have their own previous answer, thus demonstrating their disregard for the nominal content of their own answer posts.
In the past, they also tended to put a hyperlink from a random word in their answer post pointing to their eponymous company website, but they desisted from that since, after a formal warning.
There is also a comment thread touching on some aspects of this interaction. If that comment thread does not lead to any meaningful conversation regarding the authorship, goals and value of their contribution, I will tend to think that this account's sole purpose is building brand awareness, unrelated to the purpose of our site, and possibly handle it as a spam account.
I believe that "creating an account just to post spam" is grounds for account termination.
Out of curiousity, is there any specific ToS rule that "creating an account just to post spam" would be violating?
For the purpose of this question, please assume that all content ever posted by the account (except for the former hyperlinks) can be construed as at least tangentially related to the scope of our site, and that for any plagiarized content the poster holds a license from the copyright holder to post and sublicense it as theirs. So there is (hypothetically) no external "legal" problem to address and it all boils down to our own policy.
2 answers
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The ToS address this only very broadly, very generically, and with a heavy reliance on the policies of individual communities and the judgment of their members and moderators.
"Creating an account just to post spam" is somewhat hard to define, because this fact pattern depends on the creator's intention and someone acting to the detriment of the site may easily decide to refuse to discuss their own long term intentions, even after those intentions become demonstrated through their behavior, till they receive their first flags, warnings, suspensions, and/or terminations. The current ToS text does not attempt to define the boundary between any legitimate use of each site, and "spam" (irrelevant or unsolicited content meant to reach search engine crawlers or a large number of users, for the purposes of advertising, phishing, spreading malware or other goals disconnected from the purpose of the site); this is partly because each site defines its own policy on what topics or content genres are considered "solicited".
The clearest cases of "creating an account just to post spam" may arguably be in violation of one or more of the following ToS rules:
If you sign up for an account and it is terminated due to your misconduct or contravention of these Terms, you may no longer use the Service.
(Doesn't apply to any first time creators.)
You agree not to use the Service to [...] violate the then-current Code of Conduct of the Service [...] .
The CoC itself is currently rather open ended, mostly just expanding on "Be nice; be respectful". It also suggests that the key criteria ("nice" and "respectful") are not meant to be exhaustively defined within the CoC text itself:
We're deliberately not setting out everything that is and isn't allowed - bring your common sense and apply the spirit of this Code. [...] If you see anything that appears to be a violation of this Code, flag or otherwise report it.
Any account "created just to post spam" (with zero respect for the purpose and policy of the site) is guaranted to attract a steady stream of flags. It is up to the moderators to make sense of the patterns of flagging to see whether the flagging is substantiated and whether the problem is with only certain parts of the flagged posts, the entire posts, or the entire production of the account, and to take the necessary action.
The network also has a policy for promotional content. The policy isn't directly referenced from the ToS and that may be affecting its visibility for first time offenders at the moment.
In the now deleted example I used for asking this question, another policy, guidelines for referencing and quoting, was also being violated throughout the entirety of the offending account's posting history. These two policies are accessible from the help center.
(A yet harder-to-discover announcement which elaborates on AI use (and which partially overlaps with the above referenced guidelines for referencing and quoting) can be found on the meta; this is the default position of the Codidact team and individual sites may adopt their own policies from it depending on their own needs and experience.)
None of the last three policies are currently referenced from the ToS or CoC, as far as I can see; so there may be even more potentially relevant policies that my ToS-centric research has missed.
To return to the title question: a "spam account" is an account which posts solely or predominantly irrelevant or unsolicited content. Such conduct is strongly disrespectful and often also in violation of the guidelines on promotional content, other existing guidelines, or, in extreme cases (malware distribution, hate speech,...), of applicable laws. The current ToS do not address this directly, though.
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This is a partial response, not a complete answer, but I want to provide an update.
You're right that the various policy-related links are not as prominent as they should be. Changing the TOS, even just for something like this, will require notifying everyone, so before we make this change we want to review it to see if there's anything else we need to improve at the same time. We do not intend to change any policies, but if there's other copy-editing that needs to be done, this is the time to do it. (It looks like we should clarify a "may" when we next edit.) We're also reviewing to see if we should say something more about the specific topic you've asked about here, spam accounts where the spam is only in the profile and not also in posts.
Meanwhile, we have added those policy links to the sign-in page. In addition to it being visible for sign-ins in general, this puts those links on the first page a new user sees when responding to the confirmation email. (I started by looking at adding the links to that email, then thought doing it on-site would be better.) This is a small step to address the (lack of) prominence of these links. It's not a complete response.
Spam posts are not welcome, and the existing policy makes that clear. Spam accounts without accompanying spam posts are a gap, as you've noted. On the one hand, if the account never does anything, how much will it be seen? On the other hand, we don't really want to provide "link juice" for spammers. You linked to an answer I wrote about spammers; I had in mind accounts that made spam posts and wasn't thinking of spam profiles at the time I wrote that. The team needs to discuss this more and formalize a policy. We're not ignoring you, and I don't have an answer for you today.
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