I recently encountered a question that was just a request to be endorsed in arxiv. I flagged as spam on the basis that it's not a real question, just "pure" self-promotion. Was that the correct action on my part?
Image for <10k in case it gets deleted:
Validated spam flags cause the user's account to be fed to automated systems that limit/prevent future posting.
In the case of the post you describe, I deleted the post to reduce the potential benefit of this behavior (it was already closed by 5 votes), but I didn't validate the spam flag.
While I do think the post and others like it are accurately described as "spam", I didn't feel like it was necessary to apply the additional spammer penalties to this user. Unlike traditional spam accounts that exist only to spam, this appears to be a person involved in academia who is within the target audience of this site; it's possible they'll choose to contribute in other useful ways after learning this sort of post isn't allowed here.
I'd probably recommend a custom flag in these cases (same for people promoting their papers) noting the self-promotion, rather than a spam flag, but if a post seems especially blatant a spam flag is okay, too: one validated spam post won't permanently punish a user, and unless a post gets hit by the community's anti-spam service (Charcoal) it's very likely a moderator will be manually handling the post anyways.
