What is the point of spam like this?

Question

I fairly often happen across forums spammed with messages such as:

Arugula (Eruca sativa) is an quarterly green, pretended or roquette. It's been Traditional times, overclever 20 flat has be useful to "foodie" movement.Before impediment 1990s, thrill was norm harvested foreign wild. Colour has naturalized reactionary world, on top of everything elseloftier Europe addition North America. Arugula is all round Mediterranean region, wean away from Morocco and Portugal, eastern Lebanon plus Turkey. Roughly India, adult seeds are songeffortless Gargeer. Solvent is scour (Brassicaceae) family, rod is quite a distance rocket, which is public ...

What is the purpose behind such spam? It's annoying, yes, but one assumes that the spammer has some purpose other than to simply annoy to go to the effort of doing this. I don't see any URLs or hot links in the message, and no apparent "funny" formatting that might exploit something.

Is this somehow trying to influence web crawlers? (And, if so, to what purpose?) Does it somehow exploit some sort of weakness in the forum software? What?

Answer 1

They are trying to do Bayesian poisoning.

By sending lots of correct words and a few words which are used in spam, like viagra, those words get a lower spam notification (over time).

This means that after a while they can get real spam with links through to the filter.

Answer 2

My observations are that this sort of spam has been the first few posts of a newly created user. After a few of this sort, the normal sort with links included start up.

My guesses as to the purpose are:

1. Fooling anti-spam software that concentrates on first posts.
2. Getting the first ten posts out of the way so they can post links. Some forum software enforces this.
3. Search engine keyword stuffing. I don't see any obvious keywords in your sample but I have in the forums I run.