Posted by Todd Wilson on Friday, December 01, 2006 at 1:25AM :
In Reply to: Spam, and all that it entails posted by Bob Thompson on Thursday, November 30, 2006 at 9:12PM :
Its usually robots that are doing it. They are setup by a person but the robots are doing the work on forums. They use the search engine results. The sites with the most hits get hit. Often people get paid per hit and these robots scan for forums with high use and post a spam link. You click the link it gets a hit and that gives a credit for payment. They move around in the IP world so its hard to pin point the location they are at. Joe could probably ban a bank of IP address's but if theres a real user in that IP bank then they are gone too. The robots are smart. They can log in as a new user and usually get by any spam security like when they ask you to type in the 3 characters you see in that wierd box. Sometimes they also create a real email account and go to forums that require email verification. Get verified and post the spam and then disappear. If the spam user account has the message notification turned on in their profile and you go in and delete their message they can receive a message their message is gone and back they come to do it again.
It may be a robot/software called Xrumer and it has a database of 72000 forums. It gets ranks from google on hits. Its creating forum problems all over.
Todd
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