Why are they doing this?
On a spiritual level, PrayWay is under attack because God is moving through it to touch people's lives, and the enemy does not like it!
On a practical level they are doing it to create "back links" to their websites. These back links benefit the spammers in several ways. It brings direct traffic from the forums, it helps them get listed in the search engines quicker, and it can improve their ranking in the search engines.
In fact, website owners actually pay these spammers to use their spam machines to post spam on their behalf. They are not targeting us because they think PrayWay is a particularly good place to post their spam. We're just another number on their list of tens of thousands of locations that they spam daily.
A lot of time they post jokes, or other meaningless content, because the content does not matter to them. All they care about are the links at the bottom, or covertly hidden throughout the post.
Sadly they think their dirty jokes will make their post "blend in" to an average online community. Fortunately, we aren't an average forum
What should you do?
1) Do NOT click on their links. Doing so only helps them serve their purpose, and these links could lead to VERY bad websites.
2) Do not reply to them. The spammer will never see your reply. As I mentioned these are being posted by automated computer systems. You SHOULD pray for the people behind the spam, but there is no need to post your prayers because we will delete the thread anyway. Of course you could always start a new topic devoted to praying for these people.
3) We look for spam and delete it almost every day. Therefore, if you notice a spam that has not been deleted after 24 hours, please report it by emailing the link to spamreport (at) prayway.com
We have already implemented some strategies which reduce the possibility of spam, and we are currently looking for more solutions to help curb this problem.
Thank you for your prayers and God bless you!