Normally you just accept an answer and the question's closed. Although perhaps only a mod can add the status-completed tag to your question above.

That sounds like a common-sense approach. I just thought in cases where the automatic anti-spam system gets triggered (due to 6 flags) the user would be auto-deleted. So even in those cases mods have to review and take a call on whether each account is to be removed or not?

"now that "new" (low rep) users can upload images" - Dave, according to the answer Sathya linked to the new user restrictions are still present on Stack Overflow, Server Fault, Ask Ubuntu and Super User. My question seemed to point to an anomaly that's still not been answered.

Did all of them come in at exactly the same time, to the second? Could just be that you have a fan. :)

Thanks nhinkle. I do wonder though what -100 rep entails. Sometimes I've checked deleted spam questions and the user has been anonymised, while at other times their selected user name (and account) still seems active. Why isn't account deletion/banning automatic for everyone who has posted spam?

@random: Thanks, should we close this as a duplicate of that one?

@Sathya: Yes, of course I saw rev 3 where Rsya Studios's suggested edit inlined the images. But that doesn't explain rev 4 when the OP himself added more image links.

@Sathya: Nice, I didn't know that. But how come he was able to add the images here then?

Although slhck has already mentioned this, you too should update your answer to point out that spam links should not be edited out.

@harrymc: I've already stated I'm not against option 1. It's not as heavy-handed as option 2, even though it might not satisfy you because it doesn't stop downvotes. BTW I'll say it again - since this needs to be done SE-wide it should be discussed on meta.SE. Edit: Regarding discussing it now, surely this isn't something only you have faced so far. There are people with 5x more rep than you on SE and I'm sure their old answers have been downvoted too for all sorts of invalid reasons. However as far as I can see no high-rep users have ever raised this issue (if they have please link to it).

@harrymc: We'll have to agree to disagree on this. Painting all downvotes on old answers as suspect and thus needing to be prevented, while happily allowing upvotes will turn the whole voting system on its head.

@harrymc: I'm simply going by your own wording of option 2. You haven't mentioned disallowing upvotes on old posts anywhere that I can see.

@harrymc: Look, all I'm saying is it seems unfair to freeze only downvoting on old posts while allowing upvoting, as your option 2 recommends. Why go on enjoying the positives forever while conveniently preventing people from voting down after X years? If we must freeze voting on old posts (and I'm not at all convinced we do), it must be a complete freeze and not partial. Even that seems to me though to be inherently against the basic nature of SE. Option 1 is ok by me though, as stated previously.