<p>Took me a while to locate it, but unless there's some CV specific-benefit, perhaps this one should be <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/110030/should-spam-posts-be-edited">closed</a>?</p>

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<p>I've just flagged, voted for deletion and downvoted a blatant spam post. No doubt it will be taken care of in short order - a few hours at most (US moderators will probably be asleep right now).</p>

<p>But I don't like the idea that it gets to sit there as is for even one hour.</p>

<p>While it would be possible to replace the text with 'This was spam, I have edited it out', for example, that would cause people to have to take an extra click to check and see that it really was spam.</p>

<p>Would it be okay to say <strike>Strike through all the text</strike> and attempt to render any links inoperative (in the sense that you can't accidentally click on them, but would have to copy paste the address, say)?</p>

<p>The idea of even slightly mangling spam withing minutes of its appearance seems fair to me - but on the other hand I don't want to just do something like that unilaterally - there may be some consequence I am unaware of. I don't want to make anyone but the spammers less effective.</p>

<p>Should I just leave it as is?</p>

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<p>Edit 11 April 2015:</p>

<p>It has been brought to my attention on a moderator forum (with information I am not at liberty to quote, as useful as that would be) that there's a problem with mangling spam -- even textifying the links -- in that it interferes with bots/scripts designed to help find spammers and consequently for StackExchange to deal with them. Just wanted to mention it before I forgot -- it's something perhaps we should be mindful of.</p>
