Why is it that spammers dredge up old questions?

I think maybe they figure they can hide their spam crap in old questions and nobody will notice it.

@jca2 that seems counterproductive to me. A spammer’s goal is to get people to see their link as much as possible. If they try to hide it then who will give them their precious clicks?

I think the explanation is much more simple: they’re just trying to match their links to the threads that are the most relevant to the links. For example a spammer with a link to a car service will most likely spam on threads about cars. It’s a simple logic that you have to market your stuff to people who actually have a demand, and most spammers aren’t familiar with the site and have no way to know which threads are active. It just so happens that most threads they deem profitable are old.

I don’t know. The usual guy who shows up every now and then talking about his penis used to mostly spam my questions because it was a run-in with me that led to his initial banning and recurrent behavior (as far as I know—I don’t remember this going on before that run-in with me). Now he seems to spam recently-asked questions as well as old ones and I’m not sure of the nature of the pattern, if there is one. The older questions seem chosen at random.

@Demosthenes if that’s the same person I’m thinking about, that isn’t a spammer by definition. It’s a troll who looks like he wants to get even with this site.

The spammers who are selling stuff probably do a google search for certain words/phrases and questions come up from many sites, they go to those.

But some are completely random. A question is about Maple Syrup production from 2017, and the spammer wants to sell you best Konkas in Dehli Mspherson.

@Yellowdog There is also this possibility. See the “related” section over there? Spammers could assume that the related section is for popular questions, considering that some threads being displayed have a good amount of posts. They could assume that the related section works the same way as the recommendation section on Youtube. When you do marketing, if you don’t target places with “ideal” audience, at least target places with a high concentration of people. I think so, because I used to look at the same place when I was a newbie. I just offered real answers instead of spamming :D

Keep in mind that a lot of spammers don’t speak good English, and many of them come from Asian countries like India, where Facebook and Youtube are extremely popular. It wouldn’t surprise me if the spammers really apply Youtube logic on this place.

That is, assuming that the spammers are human. I don’t really have an answer in the case of bots.