Forum spam

Forum spam consists of posts on Internet forums that contains related or unrelated advertisements, links to malicious websites, trolling and abusive or otherwise unwanted information. Forum spam is usually posted onto message boards by automated spambots or manually with unscrupulous intentions with one idea in mind: to get the spam in front of readers who would not otherwise have anything to do with it intentionally.

Forum spambots surf the web looking for guestbooks, , blogs, forums and any other web forms to submit spam links to. These spambots often use OCR technology to bypass CAPTCHAs present. Some spam messages are targeted towards readers and can involve techniques of target marketing or even phishing. These automated schemes can make it more difficult for users to tell real posts from the bot generated ones. Some spam messages also simply contain tags and hyperlinks intended to boost search engine ranking rather than target human readers.

Most forum spam consists of links to external sites with the dual goals of increasing search engine visibility in highly competitive advertising domains such as weight loss, pharmaceuticals, gambling, pornography, real estate or loans, and generating more traffic for these commercial websites. Some of these links may contain code to track the spambot's identity so that if a sale goes through then the spammer behind the spambot can collect a commission.

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