Update: WTF?  Seems that spammers are targeting this post.  Comments disabled.  Ha! what are you gonna do now?

For forum admins out there, you may have noticed some “people” who register and make a few retarded posts (showing little intelligence) but with links in their signatures.

Clearly, these links are what admins would call spam, probably there to increase SEO rankings of a particular site (as Google considers a site with many inbound links on other websites to be “popular”).

I wrote a MyBB plugin which tries to mitigate the issue by hiding signatures of users with low post counts (pretty much all these spammers have 3 or fewer posts on the forum).  The plugin does its job, but I still keep getting these spammers every day on my main forum, despite their links actually not showing up (I get annoyed at their posts, as they show very little intelligence and just appear to be plain stupid).

Initially, these spammers seem to originate from Indian IPs and had a number of common traits (such as usernames which are a concatenation of two common names), but now IPs seem to range around the place a bit more (haven’t bothered to do WHOIS checks, but it’s no longer just the 116.*.*.* – 124.*.*.* range).  I guess once your site gets listed as a victim on their spam list, it just keeps getting hit.  And maybe they’re just using humans to bypass the CAPTCHA?  It still seems a little odd, since MyBB really isn’t the most widely used forum software, so specifically targeting it isn’t that productive (as opposed to other software), but if that’s the case, I guess some simple trip might stop these mostly automated scripts.

On the other hand, it appears some are done manually, because, I did see a case where the spammer actually edited his post, after realising the links didn’t show up.