Hi all.
I've been going through the forums cleaning up a whole lot of linkspam http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spamdexing that has been the work of a rather sophisticated, ongoing effort on these pages for a good while. The reason people spend their time doing this is to increase the ranking of their webpages in search engines.
There's been two types of this linkspam. One is the sort that is created by only a bot. You'll know the sort of linkspam when the post is vaguely on topic and, somewhere in the post, includes a link to something that is not on-topic. Often the text for the link, however, will be on-topic, but the actual link goes elsewhere.
The second has been done by several actual human beings who start threads with on-topic-sounding titles and generic content, and then send their bots to fill up the threads with linkspam, as described above. In some cases, normal users have treated these lede post as coming from normal users and engaged them.
I share that just to help you be aware of these sorts of tricks. If you suspect anything is linkspam, please report it. The garden is easier to weed when the weeds are small and few. :-)
