This was the same tactic that lead to the breakdown of the original Shadow Defender forum when Tony (forum owner and administrator) was absent for an extended period of time (over a year) and I was 'holding the fort' as global moderator. (Global Moderator obviously has less powers to delete everything than the admin, so I was hamstrung to some degree) Spammers worked out when I was likely to sleep then bombarded the forum as described above to such an extent that all my waking time was spent deleting bad posts and new member profiles which contained spam. The perpetrators got angry and threatened me because I was spending all my time deleting their (hundreds...maybe thousands) of posts and then started poisoning the forum by dropping cp images into the forum. Obviously, if we left these posts without comment or censure it would seem like we were acting as a willing host and platform for criminality. The onslaught became so intense that I resorted to a blocklist but the forum software choked on it and it broke the forum which made it inaccessible to me and with an absent admin, incommunicado and stuck. The forum during this period was very low use from ordinary legitimate members. The spammers wanted a dead unattended platform for their spam but their anger on my trying to stop this usage was palpable with threats to me personally. I could never really understand the intensity of it as on a quiet forum what value could it be to them to insert spam that probably would not be read by any more than a few people? Answering my own question, they'd probably just link to it from somewhere else. I later ran a forum of my own with permission on Tony's behalf where I had more control to a degree of the database but the webhosting firm eventually locked my out of accessing my own database and means to administer my forum which is a common ploy of free hosting. They get you hooked and committed then change the rules and pull the plug if you don't comply with the new terms. Although not quite the same as the original poster @ronjor mentions, that's my experience of these sorts of things. Patrick sdmod
