Please don't edit obvious spam posts just to make it suitable to the site

Question

Spam posts usually occur on SE sites and main site is not an exception. Such posts should be flagged as spam and they do get flagged. However, what I have been noticing is that sometimes, they get edited and stick for long times on the site.

This has happened in the early days of public beta, and now it has happened again. I am not aware how many times such thing has happened during this period. However, this is not a good practice.

From this answer to the main meta post,

Spam doesn't usually stay there long enough for it to be cached by search engines or to have random users stumble upon it.

Most spams are posted to get a backlink from popular sites such as this one. But since spam is deleted before crawled by search engines, this will not happen.

From the same answer,

If a post is flagged after being edited, those flags will be invalidated if the post is rolled back; unless your edit actually results in a post that shouldn't be deleted, you're just creating an opportunity for someone to make the post stick around longer.

If the post is edited, the post will stick around little longer and the spammers will get their goal accomplished.

I don't wanna call names, but here are those. Example Post 1, Example Post 2

If a post is a spam, please don't edit it, flag it as a spam.

Thank you.

Related Discussion

Answer 1

I think there are a couple of concerns worth addressing here.

1. No, we don't want to edit obvious spam for the reasons mentioned in the question and because removing the links makes it less likely that other people will flag it as spam because links are sort of required to be considered spam.

2. Sometimes it's not always completely obvious whether a post is spam or not and we can't expect every user to be perfectly capable of identifying spam posts every time, so let's not admonish them too harshly for trying to help someone.

Here's what I suggest:

If a post seems to not meet the scope of the site and contains links to other sites/products, just flag as spam and move on. Six spam flags (or one from a moderator) will delete the post.

If the post seems like it might be related to IPS and also seems like it might be advertising other sites/products without disclosing the author's affiliation, I think it's OK to edit out the links, leave a comment mentioning that the links are problematic and flag it for a moderator to decide using the custom mod flag and say something along the lines of "this may be spam but I'm not sure".

If others disagree with the flag, then nothing will happen to the post (and you've already fixed it by removing the unnecessary links) and you'll get a disputed flag but one or two disputed flags with the upside being that more people see the post and possibly decide to flag it themselves, I think it's worth the risk.