If I see a spam vandalism suggested edit, should I do anything extra about it?

Question

I just came across this suggested edit on Board & Card Games:

I've seen spammy edits like this on multiple Stack Exchange sites. They always follow the same pattern: the comment is an email address, they're from an anonymous user, and the edit consists of wiping the contents of the answer in question and replacing it with a ton of anchor tag links to all kinds of crap.

I assume this is already understood as a problem. (If not: hey SE employees, there's a particular kind of spam attack that keeps hitting the suggested edit queue.) I reject the edit as vandalism whenever I see them.

However, in the name of stopping spammers: is there more I can do, or should I reject it as vandalism, do nothing else and move on?

Answer 1

The best thing you should do when reviewing these is to mark them as rejected with the "This edit introduces spam, defaces the post in some way, or is otherwise inappropriate." reason, as you did. We track data on edits rejected with that reason in the same way we monitor for posts that are deleted via spam flags, which is used to help protect against future spam. You don't need to do more than that, setting that rejection reason is your task and we'll be handling the rest from there. ♪

That said if you do identify particular strings of a specific sort of spam, raising a meta as you are now or reporting via the Contact Us form so that we may consider additional measures, that never hurts to do as well. But for general spam handling, just using the right rejection reason will be fine.

Answer 2

Simply rejecting the suggested edit is fine.

A lot of anonymous users suggest those weird useless, garbage edits. You can do what you usually do - reject the edit. Clicking "reject" will give you a list of rejection reasons:

• Spam or vandalism
• No improvement whatsoever
• Irrelevant tags (questions only)
• Clearly conflicts with author's intent
• Attempt to reply
• Causes harm

If you choose one of the reasons listed above, it will be applied to the review votes. It will take approve/reject votes from two users (or one from the post owner or a moderator) to get the system to approve/reject the edit.

You can anytime choose to reject suggested edits if you feel so. But please read the proposed edit more carefully before rejecting, especially as "spam or vandalism" or "causes harm", as these two reasons have more extra weight than the others.

The edit under examination here seems to be vandalism, so you can just vote to reject it as "spam or vandalism." That way, you'll be fine. It's worth pointing out that too much rejected anonymous edits can trigger an IP-block edit ban, so you don't really have to worry about it.