Originally Posted By: BranShea
Works? You mean the spammer makes a living out this? It must be just as boring a job as working in a call centre.


The spammer writes a bot that goes out to various message boards such as this one, registers, and posts the spam as normal looking messages. Some of the cleverer ones will actually look like they're responding to something already posted. The less clever in that category will just repeat something already posted or say something like, "I found this to be very helpful." Sometimes there are links to the site being advertised right there in the post, sometimes it will be links in the poster's info page. They don't get a very high percentage of results but the volume they get from having a bot doing the heavy work makes it worthwhile.

The defense against this is to make it more difficult to register, whether through Captcha, by requiring the registrant to respond to an email that takes them to a login page, or some other method of weeding out non-humans.