What they're after is links on a respected site so that Google adds search weight to those links - hence all the keywords stuffed into the threads, plus multiple links.

The thing is that we tell Google to not follow any external links in our forums, expressly to stop this cheating.

Until the development team can aim their big guns at the spammers it's left to us to individually go into each thread, ban the poster, and delete the thread.

The trouble is that the well-armed spammers can just keep attacking. It's either a super-automated spam machine or an army of lowly paid spammers.

Either way it's a tough battle to keep these forums open under such weight of attack.

mcheathen, Those are in-text ads, not anything suspicious. You'll find them on many websites.