What a wierd trend

I am an admin on a few forums, and a moderator on a couple others. I'm a member of several others; some I'm a member of, I can't even remember. I think its safe to say that I'm a bit of SME on forums. I'm not calling that a good thing, either. I need to log off and go outside more often.

I'm seeing a wierd trend, though, on the slower forums I'm a member of. I've seen this happen to the comments section of various people's blogs as I'm doing research for various products, too: memberships created for the purpose of spamming. Clearly, heavy moderation keeps this from happening, but it seems to show up where the traffic level has dropped off. Somebody will make a post in a forum to sell junk that nobody wants, like medications, cleaning products, and other stuff. OK, maybe somebody wants it, but if a post like that is left up and members comment on it, they express their disgust with the practice.

The reason for it is that somehow they're making money on it. But how? Is it click throughs? Probably isn't from generating orders, but I guess that's a possibility. Spam in general doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I suppose its the online equivalent of the cold call during dinner. Somebody's placing orders, or they wouldn't be doing it. If it never paid off, the resources would be spent elsewhere.

All you people out there, listen up: quit clickin' on the spam. You're just making the Intarweb a harder place for the rest of us to get around on. Everybody complains about spam. Don't indulge them and we'll be able to get rid of it.

I know that comment falls on some deaf ears. These are the same people that believe the Minister of Interior Resources from Scamibia has randomly contacted them to help him get millions of ill gotten booty (or ill booten gotty*) out of the country. They think they need to update their security settings on their Paypal account. In fact, they're the very same people who are sure that Microsoft is going to pay them for every email they send. You people are the reason there is spam. Get off the Intarweb. You're screwing it up for those of us with some common sense.

*Name the reference.