Should spam posts be edited?

Question

I noticed that the posts of the recent spam surge on Ask Ubuntu were all edited by community members into something like

EDITED - REMOVED SPAM ANSWER

or similar.

While I understand why the users have done this and I too don't want to leave the spam content visible for longer than absolutely necessary, it made flagging more time consuming for me.

I had to check the revision for every of those possible spam posts to check if it is actually spam, instead of being able to flag directly from the review site. Spam flags carry a serious penalty, I'm not willing to add my spam flag without checking that it's really spam.

I see the benefit of editing spam, but it also causes some more effort for the later flaggers. Should we as a general policy edit out the content of spam posts, or should we deal with them solely by flagging?

Answer 1

This was recently brought up at Meta Super User also.

Why shouldn't we edit spam posts?:

• Usually, spam is easy to spot and gets removed very fast. Four spam flags delete the post.
• Moderators can easily see (or search for) the links posted by spammers and can blacklist sites once it is posted enough.
• Spam doesn't usually stay there long enough for it to be cached by search engines or to have random users stumble upon it.
• As nhinkle says, most links do not even need to be removed, unless they are linking to porn, viruses, or disturbing content.
• Editing spam can result in the remainder of the spam post being considered "good". This can end up with the spammer getting upvotes for what was posted as spam. The user gaining reputation for spam is bad, because it adds an air of legitimacy to any further posts made by the user on that site, and even adds legitimacy to posts which the user makes on other Stack Exchange sites. If the user gains sufficient reputation, then their posts will be exempt from some, but not all, spam checks.
• Even if you feel the content of the post which is exclusive of the spam links is good, and you think they may have just inadvertently added some unrelated or marginally related link, you should check the post quite carefully. A very common tactic for spammers is to add spam links to content which is plagiarized from another post or elsewhere on the internet. That is done to make the post look more legitimate, which delays having the post dealt with as the spam which it is.

In short, the community is usually too fast for spammers, so by the time anything can happen out of it, it's already gone.

Answer 2

I think editing like this is counter-productive because:

1. It makes it harder to manually spot patterns of spam through searching/memory
2. It presumably makes automated spam handling harder

The automatic downvotes from flagging spam seem to be sufficient to hide most posts suitably far down the answer list until they're deleted.

Answer 3

In addition to avoid editing spam posts, I'd like to mention as well that you should also roll it back ASAP if someone else edits a spam post.

The key here is ASAP, because if you perform the rollback too late, you may obliviously invalidate some red flags cast after the edit.

See my concern here: Dilemma after someone else edits a spam post