Well CharleyO,
I have a different vieuw on these cases of "spim". I think they were manually put there. Normal folks and webforum users cannot imagine what a bunch of negative oriented people are our out there, that finds joy in putting spam out just to irritate, troll postings just to spoil the pleasure of others, doings things for reasons of jealousy or plain simple because they cammot stand a nice atmosphere. There are political postings, there are trolls because someone said negative things about a program they perceive rightly or falsely, a lot of people cannot handle their emotions rightly anymore, and we have a lot of that going around even on the Internet lately.
The full right and actually the job and obligation of the moderators or administration of the webforum site is to take these messages or whole threads out at once to sanitize the forum. This should be done anonimously, without explanation, "spim", "trolling", non-related material, do not fit in. Of course there must be room for wishing well, a joke, some humour, or signs of appreciation or critique, that is natural to the process of communication, but otherwise everything should be clear,
polonus