I was positive I set rewards to decline but there is no strikethrough on the pending payout.

Rewards are indeed declined (for HIVE, POB, and every other token except VYB). On VYB the Hive 'decline-rewards' feature is ignored. As such, there is no way (currently) to 'decline' rewards on VYB.

However, the POB front-end has a bug in that it does not show the POB rewards with strike-through even though no POB will be paid out when decline-rewards is selected.

Intentional abuse of the VYB 'ignore decline-rewards' feature will result in disciplinary action (e.g. temporary muting). Clearly stating up front that this is a re-post of old content should generally suffice. However, this is one of those topics that needs community input as we move forward (as in, what constitutes abuse and how will we respond to such abuse).