The reason they do this is for getting "pingbacks" ... they garner attention in that manner, and they hope that it will direct people to their personal profile page where they, nine times out of ten, have filled every available space of it with promotional links and urls. Of course, when people do check those profiles, they see nothing ... as we have been there already and wiped all those promo links and urls. :devil:
They also usually resister with one IP and post with another IP ... their method of trying not to get caught ... but we are wise to their methods and in effect block both IP's from registering again as well as reporting them to an international database of known spammers that forum admins use to check up on new registrations.
Most new spam posts get auto-tagged by our own internal spam-bot ... our internal spam-bot searches for spam type things (it learns as it goes along) in posts and then flags the post and puts it into moderation queue ... only forum staff can "see" the posts in moderation queue, and we perform the ritual banning on those, delete the posts and report those users to the international database. As a forum admin, I have an API "key" for entering data into that online database.
Sorry John...honest.