I just had a look around my site and was surprised to see that this wasn’t already a feature.
When a user is muted by the system after their first post, usually they are a spammer and have a blank account. These accounts are usually database noise and I think it would be great if there were an option to have these account automatically be purged. Obviously you can just click the Delete user option in the review queue and not have to deal with silencing at all but I can still imagine this would be useful.
Only because you say you couldn’t imagine a reason to keep those accounts around: I instead suspend forever so that it’s easy for me to correlate data between the accounts to recognize what are likely new spammers showing up… Not saying you should do this, just giving an example for why it would be optional.
Yes, I strongly recommend using the “delete and block” option with spammers, this avoids the issue of noise and makes it a little harder if someone wanted to attempt to spam you again from the same IP.
I don’t use “and block” with residential IPs because they get recycled, and today’s spammer is tomorrow’s legit user.
Many of my spammers come through VPNs and churn from IP to IP. Using “and block” just makes legit use through a VPN more and more likely to fail over time; it ends up being a self-DoS in those cases.
I’ve worked out in various ways (sockpuppet accounts, registration/last use from different IPs) that the vast majority of my repeat spammers are not using fixed IPs.
I’ve had a few spammers who actually are coming from corporate headquarters, and some of them have responded to reason and stopped spamming. It’s the fiver (or whatever mechanical turk) spammers who are the largest scourge, and they aren’t mostly poisoning their own wells, they are salting their neighbor’s IP address earth.
