He's been a member since 2019 but has only made 3 posts at that time until this one now. However, 3 years is a long time for a spammer to wait before starting to post rubbish and it you look, although the post is a direct copy and paste of yours, he's embedded links into it (or at least he had until I edited it and took them out). That is a common spammers way of doing it so I suspect his account has been hacked and it wasn't him that posted.

Thanks Richard.

Theres other dodgy looking urls in the rest of his posts if you check https://rangerovers.pub/user/fotso/posts as well.

For what purpose other than malevolence? They have skills that should be put to good use.

It looks to me like the posts have been made and then subsequently edited silently to add the hidden links. Whether by him or by somebody else using his log in there doesn't appear to be any way of telling. I would be able to do it on RR.net but I have admin status on there so maybe it could be done on here but beyond my pay grade (if there was a pay grade....).

dave3d wrote:

For what purpose other than malevolence? They have skills that should be put to good use.

Can be search engine manulipation - the more links from different sites there are can effect some of their algrothims etc.

I've seen similar editing at a later point done on the LPG forum with posts as well though its fairly rare. Other boards I post on have a short window of time that you can edit the post on as a standard user, phpBB doesn't seem so restrictive by default (though that could be its so user-unfriendly to setup in the first place that it can do it, but just hasn't been setup to do so)