Many, many more people read posts than answer them. Leaving those posts up will give some proportion of readers the idea that such questions are reasonable, ope

Many, many more people read posts than answer them. Leaving those posts up will give some proportion of readers the idea that such questions are reasonable, open holes in our knowledge. Even if there's an answer provided (potentially hours later), the damage would have already been done. The forum is a place for education. Leaving bad faith questions up hurts that goal and there aren't many practical alternatives, especially given the massive asymmetry in effort by contributors. Did you know that posts often take multiple hours to write? It would only take a couple dozen malicious posters to completely overwhelm the relatively small contributor base without mod intervention.