Spam... it's what's for dinner

[Viperion]

It appears the spammers/bots are learning, Boris has posted a couple of posts which look like spam to me (in the Off Topic forum, in the "Hi" and Video Games and Agent Hunter threads.

I think I gained the Baffled I condition reading those posts.  I just don't even.  What's the purpose / endgame?

A SysAdmin explained this to me the other day and it's frighteningly cunning - they'll post something, somewhere, that is vaguely on topic but just gibberish enough to be ignored by the majority of the posters. Then a few days later, the bot will edit the post, putting in a link for a product or service of some kind. This means that people are less likely to ID it as spam, but when the gCrawler next pops by it goes to the link, thus increasing the hit count and therefore position of said product on a google search.

Pretty clever stuff, actually.

[Sletchman]

Upon reading that, I'm not even sure if I should be mad or just impressed.  Madpressed?

It's diabolical...

[Morgenstern]

So we're up another 9,000 registered users since last I checked about two months ago I'd guess (doubling the previous count).

That's just mind boggling to me.