martinibuster - 7:19 am on Jul 27, 2011 (gmt 0)

None of the blackhat forums I've ever read suggest that spammers make a couple of fluff posts before spamming.

In order to not get deleted the forum spammers have progressed to more subtle ruses in order to appear legit so as to pass the average moderator sniff test. Fluff posts are just one of many variations that forum spammers take. There is fluff that is designed to not appear fluffy, like a real post. The idea behind fluff and other similar and more sophisticated techniques is that push button forum spam is removed from active forums with vigilant mods. But most forum mods are chosen for skills in their niche more than their community management/spam fighting abilities. Thus, the subtle spam with more sophisticated fluff will make it past the average forum mod and remain. There are more details to this method that I have seen professional forum spammers use, but I'm not going to detail them because I don't want to be the cause of more forum spam. It's not something I do or recommend.