I see a lot of answers to questions that could be better as a comment, is it just to flag these as "not an answer"? The dialog in the flag box tells me answers-as-comments should be flagged but I don't see this often?
Should I just comment to the user and tell them their mistake?
The answer that Murch linked to does provide some good guidance, but Bitcoin has some unique challenges when it comes to moderation in general.
Ordinarily, moderation activity is commensurate with the growth of the site. The bigger the site, the more (and more interesting) moderation becomes. Bitcoin is still a smaller site, yet interesting developments in the news can send participation (and an influx of very low quality posts) through the roof.
Think of it like a small town named Bedford Falls. Now, somehow - this town has become a popular destination for party seeking college students, and there's no way to reasonably predict (and brace for) these waves of people arriving. They're loud, they leave litter all over the place, and many of them aren't going to be back until the next party bus pulls in.
Moderation styles on sites vary depending on the size and the expectations of the community. Since we're prone to random explosions in activity - we might want to consider adopting the 'firmness with finesse' style of moderation that larger sites like Stack Overflow are using - at least during the periods that we see increased calls for moderators to do things. This means we can't always wait around for the community to handle stuff, especially if it looks like spam, or is of extremely poor quality. It's these kinds of broken windows that become self-replicating, damaging to search placement and off-putting to people finding us while looking for a higher-than-usual quality of resource.
In the coming weeks, I'm going to be providing a lot of coaching and input on discussions surrounding site moderation, growth and scope - much of it coming from my experience as a moderator in various capacities before joining the company last year.
I'm digressing a bit from your original question; I could have probably just said that we're at a sort of weird point where a blanket philosophy isn't quite possible - but I wanted to get into some better detail.
