Why have such a harsh rule, and why ban people without warning them?
In a nutshell, the spam problem is so bad we have no choice. Forum-spam works in a similar way to email spam, except that the spammers post messages in forums. In the good old days, forum spammers were mostly automated so email validation and CAPTCHA security kept most of them out. These days the spammers employ real people to manually post spam messages. No amount of automated tests can stop them because they are just as real as genuine members. Forum spam is often quite sophisticated. For example, a spammer may post a message that appears to be a genuine question such as “I’ve heard about this product and it seems to have good reviews. Does anyone know anything about it?” Sometimes the spammer registers two or three additional usernames in order to reply to their own question with glowing recommendations. Another common trick is to post a “helpful tutorial” that just happens to include links to the spammer’s products. All of this wouldn’t be so bad if the products were good, but they
