[edcrfv]

Automated forum account creation/posting, blog comment spamming, craigslist account creation/posting to name a few.

Some other famous sites that are doing this since the mid 2000s - http://decaptcher.com

They integrate with just about every famous spam tool.

UPDATE: Automated Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail account creation, etc. They create accounts in bulk and then spam through the gmail, yahoo, and hotmail accounts by tools that are being sold.

[ddemchuk]

forum spamming is far too expensive if you're paying for captchas. There is an extremely famous/popular forum spamming software on the market (made by russians) that internally solves captchas.

If you're going to forum profile spam, you'll go broke paying for captchas.

[edcrfv]

Ok I stand corrected, the economics of paying for forum spamming does not make sense and the software you mentioned (I don't want to name it here) does solve many captchas automatically (It is even rumored to solve Google's captchas)

But for other stuff that I mentioned in my previous comment, it does make sense for them economically and they do use it.

[pdenya]

I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to provide names or links here. I'm sure if HN users want to spam we're resourceful enough to figure it out for ourselves and for those of us who don't care to spam it would be helpful to see what we're up against.

[edcrfv]

Yes I did mean that. I didn't mean to insult the intelligence of HNers though. Just thought it wouldn't be prudent to mention here!

[ianhawes]

Oh you mean XRumer?