The best way to make spam ineffective is to delete it quickly! The single best thing you can do when you see spam is flag it:

Just about anything else you can do is at best a waste of your time and effort, unless it somehow leads directly to more folks flagging the post as spam. Editing in particular can actually be counter-productive, both by making the spam less obvious to other flaggers and by allowing folks to roll back flags added since the edit.

Thinking you're gonna discourage future spam by breaking the links is, I'm afraid, rather naive; best we can tell, most spam is very nearly free to whoever is behind it - indeed, a tremendous amount is blocked automatically and never seen by anyone, much less followed... Yet the cost to generate it is apparently so low that this doesn't matter, meaning any extra time you spend on it is time wasted.

###See also: Should spam posts be edited?

The best way to make spam ineffective is to delete it quickly! The single best thing you can do when you see spam is flag it:

Just about anything else you can do is at best a waste of your time and effort, unless it somehow leads directly to more folks flagging the post as spam. Editing in particular can actually be counter-productive, both by making the spam less obvious to other flaggers and by allowing folks to roll back flags added since the edit.

Thinking you're gonna discourage future spam by breaking the links is, I'm afraid, rather naive; best we can tell, most spam is very nearly free to whoever is behind it - indeed, a tremendous amount is blocked automatically and never seen by anyone, much less followed... Yet the cost to generate it is apparently so low that this doesn't matter, meaning any extra time you spend on it is time wasted.

###See also: Should spam posts be edited?