my story about this forum

[Ernie]

Question...

Anyone have a theory on why people from Russia, Thailand, China, etc post these kinds of messages here? There seems to be no form of advertising in the message. I wonder if they are just testing the waters on what they can get away with on this forum.

Baffled,
Ernie

[Ash]

It's interesting, Googling phrases from this post shows that it's been made in hundreds of web fora on a huge range of topics. Your theory is good, Ernie -- a security probe of some sort. I wonder if it's also a way of link-baiting. If a particular bit of text is reproduced on huge numbers of websites, perhaps Google thinks it's important, and therefore somehow it becomes valuable? In any case, it's probably best to delete the (obviously spammy) thread.

-Ash.

[Ernie]

"Googling phrases from this post shows that it's been made in hundreds of web fora on a huge range of topics."

Yeah, it is interesting, if not too surprising. Thanks for the input Ash.

Yeah, I delete a couple of these a day and have certain anti-spam measures in place which I added. The problem used to be a lot worse.