Shill Decoy posts and Proxy user assistance obfuscates their complete rooting out for some Mod/Admins & stealth mods …
They lose a little on each new post, but make it up in volume.
Can one be a spammer if they NEVER post up a Linky or Pic evar ?
Absolutely. We quite often catch some of them before they post. We Google search their name or IP and find them on spam lists. Ban!
Forget the mods and their tools, we have a Acme Nuclear Running Coach Spam Buster. They don’t have a chance.
And they can often be recognized from the name alone. Most nonsense names are spammers, and they recycle previously used names with variants. I keep an eye on the “Welcome to our newest member” line on the front page to catch them. There’s nothing better than banning one before he’s even posted.
It’s easily done and I’ve done it myself on a few occasions. You find a message board that you think interesting. You read a few threads and then register to enable you to reply whenever you feel so minded. Bookmark, go away and you end up never going back, distracted by other sites, regular sites, real life, etc. (My bookmarks seem as numberless as the sands of the Kalahari and equally impossible to navigate. I keep meaning to prune them but never get round to it.)
Interesting-- It never would have occurred to me to register for a board until such time as I decided that I did want to post. I’d often wondered about all of the zero-post members.
IIRC, even before the era of stream-spam, the median number of posts per user was 1, and the mode was 0: A little over a third were zeroes, a little under a third were ones, and the remaining third was everyone else. Of course, the average number of posts was up in the hundreds, due to the outliers with thousands of posts pulling up the average.
I would register to enable the “go to next unread post” feature and to track what has been read.