Why are they spamming my board?

[Hugene]

Hello all

I have some custom protections on my BB board, that prevent links from being posted. But I regularly see some random words spamming, and right now, I am fighting with "berty gkikko oppa ve ? limmol pondes?". What's the point of this spamming, what are they trying to achieve?

Thanks

[LifeinAsia]

My guess is they might be checking to see how long before the post gets manually deleted. By posting random garbage, it's less likely to be blocked by filters.

[maximillianos]

Yeah, I would agree. They are most likely testing your site for potential future spamming.

[StoutFiles]

Prepare yourself for a glorious spam battle.

[LifeinAsia]

Agree with the battle part, disagree with the glorious part.

[thecoalman]

Preventing links will deter human spammers but it won't deter bots.

A google search brings up a lot of results for that text, undoubtedly bots. Prevent them from registering in the first place and it won't be an issue. It appears most of the majority of the forums that text appears on are phpbb forums, there is very long thread on phpbb's site with numeraous mods for preventing bot registration, the mod that asks a question is bullet proof from my experience.

As far as why... I have theory about many of these posts that you see that at first glance normally wouldn't be considered spam. There's no link in the signature or profile of the poster or the post itself. A lot of forums allow for editing posts forever. My guess is they are just planting seeds for later editing when the thread is long buried and the only one visiting the page will be SE's. I haven't actually seen this happen yet but I am following a post on another site that was made about 6 months ago that I suspect was made for this purpose to see if that happens.