There are a number of well known footprints forum spammers are looking for, such as file names, but I recently discovered a keyword footprint that's attracting loads of spam attacks.

One of my forums was receiving an exceptional amount of spam. Everytime my mods found a new one it would often be from this one particular forum.

I checked the permissions but nothing was wrong. Perhaps it was a statistical blip? No, this was way beyond a blip. The topic of the forum itself is as far removed from pills, dating, finance, and gambling as any topic could be. There was zero contextual reason to explain why this forum was so obviously being targeted.

After thinking about it I theorized that perhaps the title of the forum was to blame. The forum under attack was a sub-forum, one of two sub-forums within a topic. The name of it was General Discussions. After I changed the title that particular forum stopped being spammed.

Then I started getting spammed in another forum, this one entitled, General Topics. Starting to see a pattern? The last spammer started his post with this remark,

hello guys I am new, I see that [myforumname] is great, especially "General Topics" directory!

General Topics is the name of the subforum for a highly specific topic. It's not General Topics as in a free for all or even a FOO forum.

It appears that forum names like general topics, general discussions, and "off topic" are being targeted.

A search for "is great, especially "General Topics" directory!" (with the quotation marks) will demonstrate this.