Spud

Thanks, so it appears this forum suffers with the same as the one I use too. Only difference is you have more Admins and mods here during the day/night than we do, which take care of things. Guess, as with many things, it's an uphill, never-ending problem that will require human intervention to keep it in check. I just wish the global authorites would be more pro-active and co-operative in nailing these people once and for all. My view is the laws make it nearly impossible for Anti-spam and security companies to catch and deal with them fully.

Yes, we have had that too including others and even had a couple try to link rogue security software too. Naturally I and other mods try to ban these people quickly but we cant be online 24/7 and some do remain on the forum (that slip through the auto spam check) for a few hours. I have asked Admin on the site to prohibit signature linking but this would also affect other forum users too as some do like their pretty signature tags. I would be interested to know how this forum combats this issue as I dont see the same thing here.

Thanks for the reply. I had considered this as they often do that within browser games but on the forum I have not heard of anyone getting any spams from these spam accounts, in their private forum mailbox. Well, no-one has said nor have I had any.

Hi all, I have been dealing wirth spammers for a long time on various forums but one thing seems to evade me about why they do certain actions! Lets explain more: A spammer opens a forum account and creates a profile (using scripts or some spam auto-spam account creator). Often they would just do the basics and then view their profiles for anywhere betwen 5 minutes to a few hours) before logging off. On occasions they will either add to this or return the same day or days later and then update the profiles to include Spam links in their profiles and signatures yet do not do any posts! Often I will also come across many of them uncluding their ICQ address in their contact too! Now, what I currently suspect to be the case, but I have not been able to get any confirmation or direction on this, is a spammer uses the search engines to scan their profiles thus spreading the links contained within them. As for their ICQ I suspect they hope people will click the address or they use zombies to connect to it using this contact ICQ link. Regardless of why they remain viewing profiles when there is/isn't any linking, leaves me to think that they are using the forum as another IP in their net, where they log in and then move on through it. I would be curious as to what other people think or any information they have that confirms or explains the above.

Adding to reasons: It may have been over-run by spammers. Too many whingers posting unhelpful information.