Not really on the thread topic, but:
Riffing off the "SEO" statement, SEO Optimizers "backlink" their spam, in order to increase and then forward their "juice" to their intended URL. Meaning that Forum Staff could run a search of a forum post, in order to see if it's backlinked, and also carefully monitor which accounts have dropped a link to, say for example an Amazon listing. Any and all HTML links should be scrutinized carefully, since that is the ultimate objective of all spammers.
SEO doesn't need links; it just has to contain the words that suggest or name the thing being optimized. Most of the SEO here is members that sign up as the name of the thing or place they're spamming for. A lof of the rest just put the name in their profile somewhere, and/or have their profile image or banner as the name / logo of their spam source.
Almost none actually post anything at all (the ones that do are very easily caught and filtered out with almost no effort; the ones that do it the other way require someone (me, mostly) to go thru each profile and actually see the page to find them, then remove their spam one profile at a time (because there is no way to do it en-masse).
There are also some "retarded" spambots that dont' stick their spam in the visible fields, but instead just have email addresses that are the spam. (some of them aren't even real addresses so the profile can never be validated so they could never log in and actually post spam).
There are *many many many* more "retarded" spambots that simply create thousands of randomly-named accounts that are never used for anything and contain no profile info. Many of these also use random garbage email addresses and so cannot even be activated as they'll never receive the activation email. Sometimes we're lucky and they'll use a domain or other definable term that is not used by real accounts and so can be filtered out to prevent some of them from signing up at all, until their bot changes to some other domain or term.
Some of the random junk accounts are "latent" spammers, which are handed off to other bots (or human criminals) that then pollute the forum with their profile spam. This is even harder to detect and remove because it happens long after the processing during signup, so the only way to catch it is to just continuously waste hours going thru all the thousands of profiles on the forum and see if anyone has added spam to it, then remove it one profile at a time.
Which is not to say that all HTML links should be banned, however the spammers are dropping them to make their money; the Forum has a right to charge for the privilege. Even a very small and nominal charge will drive off 99% of all spammers, if in the event that Forum Staff wants to remain "friendly" to well-known and "local" members.
Charging for advertising would do absolutely zero nothing zilch about the spammers.
Spammers do what they do completely separately from anything else, just like other criminal elements of society, to gain for themselves by using other people's resources for their own purposes without any form of recompense, just because they can.
I'd guess that keeping this forum clean of spammers takes at least 10-20 hours per week, between me and the rest of the mod/admin team, which is all unpaid wasted time we could be doing real useful things like helping more real users, organizing the data we already have so users can find it better, and working on our own projects.
If I couldn't pre-filter anything it'd probably be a lot more than that; it's getting harder to be able to create useful filters as spammers change methods.
Even without any form of Ai assisting the process, and just human criminals using simple bots and/or other human criminals to create the spam, eventually the internet will be all spam and no useful content, by ratio. Some places have already approached or exceeded more spam than content. Some forums and other resources have actually gone private pay-to-access because the problems were so bad that the companies or groups running them couldn't afford to control the spam anymore. Some simply shutdown and disappeared.
