The only real concern of spammers remaining members in the member list should be that most spammers will register so that they get the ability to peruse the membership listing, thereby being able to capture email addresses for use in spamming.
Since this forum does not give out email addresses directly, but instead forces users to use an email form to send out an email, this defeats the spammer on that count.
The other thing spammers use, is like wiredesignz said, they put links in their profile to the sites they want people to visit. This does not directly effect the membership of the forum, but rather helps the spammers to increase their page rank by having more “links” to their site scattered throughout the web. This, in effect, aids the spammers gain search engine ranking.
I wouldn’t be worried about our membership getting zapped by visiting one of those sites. I would hope our membership is of a more computer savvy variety and would not fall prey to such silliness. My only concern is that this seems to be an aid for the spammer that helps make them successful. I hate spammers.
However, as an administrator of 3 forums and 2 blogs, I know that going after these types of spammers cost more manpower than it is worth when you weigh the cost/benefit factors. The cost, of course, is primarily an administrators time. Some of these are tricky, and will wait several weeks and sometimes over a month before they return to add the “advertisements” to their profile. I’ve had that happen. It makes it very difficult to track.
