[ale] rsyslog blank lines after a stop

[Alex Carver]

On one of my machines a known bug is emitting harmless warning messages
that are getting sucked up into messages and kern.log.  I just want to
silence these warnings so I set up at the top of rsyslog's configuration
(version 8.24.0):

:msg, contains, "text of warning" stop

This is before the kern.* that sends to kern.log and also before *.=warn
which sends to messages.

The result, though, is that the message is erased but a blank,
timestamped entry is added to both files.  So where I used to get:

timestamp hostname kernel: [ticks] "text of warning here plus other
information" <EOL>

I now just get in both messages and kern.log:
timestamp hostname kernel: [ticks]<EOL>

I had expected the log entries to be gone completely.  I have a similar
line at the top of rsyslog.conf that looks for key text and diverts to a
file:

:msg, contains, "key text" -/var/log/keytext.log
& stop

This one works, I don't get any "key text" entries in kern.log or
messages.  I tried something similar using /dev/null but that still
causes the same blank lines.

I'm considering giving up and switching to syslog-ng on this system but
I figured I'd ask and see if anyone had a thought.  Searching everywhere
online doesn't offer any suggestions about why I get blank lines after a
stop.