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Because nuking spam is something that can be automated using a spam blacklist like Akismet and submitting the spam to that.

But when you quote it, there is either a risk that you get dumped as a spammer too, or that the spam gets skipped which then defeats the point of attempting to nuke it.

Spammers seldom post just once, and if they're posted in 2 threads I'm pinning my hopes on the automated cleanup nuking other things they've posted. Which is useless if you've quoted it.

OK, doing it all manually would of course take too long, but presumably in this case you could just edit smithchild's post?