The evolution of a Forum Spammer

Remember when forum spamming used to take some effort?

Back in the day when a forum spammer used to wake up in the morning, look at themselves in the mirror and think, "I've got a big day ahead of me, lot's of hard work to do. Go get 'em tiger."

Not like today's forum spammers who are a lazy and pathetic breed. They roll out of bed at about lunch time, scratch their crotch (because they haven't actually showed since last month sometime....or was it the month before?). They head down to the local government assistance office, pick up their government assistance cheque, bitch and complain about having to actually walk down there when that lazy good for nothing government should be actually depositing their scab money directly into their account, and then wander home again. They fire up their forum spamming software, click a button, and then go pass out on the lounge room floor amidst potato chip wrappers and three week old pizza boxes that are now growing fur.

Oh how times have changed.


Now while I'm maybe tingeing on the edge of sarcasm here (hey, it keeps me amused), have you noticed how bad forum spamming is getting lately? I don't mean in terms of volume, but in terms of content.

Forum spamming has become automated, and the "smart" software that creates "smart spam" is pretty bad.

A common method is to just read a snippet of an earlier post, and then repost it in the same thread.

But the dodgiest one I saw was this morning in my forum:

The spam post was masquerading as a bug report, reporting bugs in two features that my product doesn't even support.

One of them was about stock control not counting correctly when a sale is made. Obviously a feature of a physical cart. Not one that my software needs.

I'm sure the spammer thinks he's a genius by coming up with such a brilliant piece of spam, but seriously? Let's forget the fact that forum spammers have psychological issues, and let's pretend for a second that they're real people. Who would possibly think that posting potentially damaging fake bug reports in a company's forum is a good idea?

Is it just my imagination, or have the proud people we know as Forum Spammers lost their way?

cheers
Sam


PS. Yes, I'm taking the piss, and I don't take this as seriously as you may gather from my post. I think forum spammers are the bane of society, but it's nothing the "Delete" button can't fix. But it's interesting to see how the spamming industry is changing as they try and automate their activities, and use "intelligent" software to do it. Unfortunately the people using it aren't intelligent enough to realise their intelligent software is about as smart as a cricket bat.