I'm wondering why recently spam posts are being dealt with by leaving them in the threads for a while empty labeled "spam post/user banned" or similar, instead of just deleting the post altogether after they are reported? A bit "untidy" looking. They seem to vanish eventually though.
This is being done because someone who shall remain nameless deleted an entire thread instead of just the spam post within the thread. This happened twice recently. If it's a new thread with only one post in it, then the thread can't be deleted. If it's a 'reply' post to an existing thread, the offending spam can be removed.
What Steven has done was to disable the removal of the entire thread, thereby preventing 'accidents.' The moderators can now delete the text of the spam post along with modifying the spammer's profile (removing spam links in the sig, Yahoo Messenger links, ICQ, etc) but not the username.