Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-10452902-20150822191003/@comment-4568327-20150826162906

Jr Mime wrote: First of all, the "span"/spam you are describing should not appear at all. Special:Contact/bad-ad.

I believe he is referring to the HTML  tags that the rich-text editor often foists on you unknowingly when you use Ctrl+B or Ctrl+I. These tags can't be detected in RTE and must be removed via source mode. AFAIK they don't do anything other than make it difficult to read diffs and the raw wikitext of the page.