There were a couple of recent spam posts which I edited to remove the content.
They were both actually deleted within a few minutes of my edit.
As a general rule what do the moderators want to happen on this site, i.e. should non-moderators do anything with spam other than down vote and flag?
It should be flagged as spam.
Collecting 6 spam flags gets the question deleted on the spot. Which is a good reason to not edit spam so that other users can clearly tell it is in fact spam and flag it as such. Note furthermore that the rolling back of edits may invalidate flags and therefore delay the deletion of the post. So editing is actually not helping.
Editing spam is rather counter-productive, see this Meta post:
Why shouldn't we edit spam posts?:
- Usually spam is easy to spot, and gets removed very fast. 6 spam flags deletes 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.
- 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.
In short, the community is usually too fast for spammers, so by the time anything can happen out of it, it's already gone.
Users with at least 10k rep may also excercise their privilege to vote on deletion of the question. However, three delete votes are required. Spam is likely to be deleted at that point by the mechanism laid out above.
