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When flagging spam, I usually delete tags and replace them by tag-removed as well. I just received a comment suggesting that this is not useful. It probably doesn't matter much either way, as spam usually disappears quite quickly. Does anyone else have an opinion?

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    $\begingroup$ It is better to not edit spam posts at all, and just flag them as spam (see Should spam posts be edited? on Meta SE). $\endgroup$ Dec 13, 2022 at 14:25
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    $\begingroup$ Thanks for bringing this up here. I was the original commenter. I don't have much of a presence on this particular site; I basically only flag spam. $\endgroup$
    – tripleee
    Dec 13, 2022 at 16:31
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    $\begingroup$ Re: spam usually disappears quite quickly. That all depends on your definition of "quickly". As mentioned in the MO chatroom, median seems to be around 25 minutes on main and 50 minutes on meta. $\endgroup$ Dec 25, 2022 at 9:56
  • $\begingroup$ That surprises me, I think the average that I have observed is much less. $\endgroup$ Dec 26, 2022 at 10:23

2 Answers 2

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No. Spam should be flagged as spam and removed. Please limit your interactions with spam posts to exactly that.

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This would be probably more suitable as a comment, but it is too long - to have some stats on this, I'll include some SEDE queries. (So that one can estimate how often tags such as and are used for spam posts.)

The table Votes includes spam as VoteTypeId = 12, so at least some data can be obtained from this database. (I do not claim that the data there are perfectly reliable - some spam posts might have been deleted without being flagged; somebody might have flagged a post which actually isn't spam. But such exceptions will probably be rare.)

Both tags were briefly mentioned in chat (in connection with spam) - the tag spam and the tag tag-removed.

Some related posts elsewhere:

As usually, I will include a link to this post: What should I do when I see a spam post on MO? (Although editing tags isn't mentioned there explicitly - only editing in general.)

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