Thanks Marc, Jeff's comments made me change the way I think of spammers, I always felt bad about destroying accounts but 99%+ of the ones I'd want to destroy only had a single point of rep, so clearing them away really is the best idea, I was being too 'nice' by just suspending them. That said suspending them meant they couldn't create a new account with the same OpenID I think, now I've destroyed them all I guess they're free to create new accounts? is there anything we could do about that? Ultimately the best way of stopping spammers is by not allowing new accounts to add urls to answers.

Agreed Robert, we're not burning their life's work are we :)

I don't destroy in case I get it wrong, it has happened, the signal/noise ratio is too high to be 100% right all the time. But if that's what you're saying then fair enough.

votes to close wasn't 5, you're right, but we had four mod-alerts stating it wasn't a real question - in my mind actually mod-alerting with a comment is more effort than a single click and gets some extra credit, especially off established, high rep users.

I'll reopen it, because you're alerting me about it, but please understand that I closed it for the same reason - people asked me to. We can't know everything about every subject on this board but if a number of people say "this question shouldn't be open" and it's a low quality question, which it undoubtably is, then we have to listen.

Part of moderating is about looking at what other users alert us about and using what little free time we give to the site to make the best judgements we can. We get hundreds of alerts per week and have limited time to deal with them, when we get multiple alerts from established high-rep users to a badly-written, one line question by a new user that's already been answered then it's an easy call to bring a close to the question. SF is a pretty democratic place, if enough people want a question closed or reopened then it happens even without moderators.

Hi, I agree with this, thanks

Thanks Jeff, as I said I'm much more concerned about people just using the plain 'vmware' tag in the future, oh and I saw your chat post about their product list, personally I find it very easy as that's what I do, it would be much worse if someone just used a plain 'microsoft' tag as they sell hundreds of products.

I'd like to close this question as in appropriate for this site, anyone else?

oh, that's simple...

Thank you for doing what you do by the way, and I fully support what you discuss.