The Register, as of October 2008, XRumer can defeat captchas of Hotmail and Gmail. This enables the software to create accounts with these free email services, which are used to register in forums that it posts to. XRumer also posts slowly initially, in an attempt to avoid detection by posting unnaturally fast. Between 2009 and 2011 XRumer no longer recognized Hotmail and Gmail captchas due to a change in captcha format. Users of XRumer could only defeat such captchas utilizing external human captcha services. Defenses Webmasters of topical forums face an ongoing battle against XRumer software, users of which are almost always in violation of forum terms of service, and/or have no interest in the actual forum topic. The users of the software have created an entire industry whose sole purpose is to protect internet sites against users of XRumer. Forum administration tasks against XRumer are often a constant, daily effort, which include identifying new user accounts that are from XRumer users, deleting posts/threads created by the software, and deleting/disabling the user accounts. The easiest method to defeat Xrumer is to simply require the first post of any new forum member or blog poster to be approved before it can appear. There are several resources that help block forum spam, which reference reports of forum spam by username and IP address. If a user/IP has appeared in the site's lists, it is highly likely that it is a black-hat user of XRumer. Common defensive actions by webmasters are to institute IP-based posting bans on subnetworks used by the spammers. The spam messages in a forum typically take the form of "link spam" which will often be included in older topics and private messages (PMs) leaving the newer threads and posted messages "clear" of apparent spam. Sophisticated spammers will copy posts from other areas of the site, giving the appearance of a valid, on-topic reply. The best clue that it is a spammer is that the links in the user profile are completely unrelated to the forum topic, and the posted messages, while seemingly within the general topic of the forum, will be non-sequiturs and out-of-place within the topic thread. Alternatively, the spammers post generic "I am excited to begin posting and contributing here." messages that are content-neutral. The damage caused to forums is classified in several areas: first and foremost, the admin time to clean the forum; second, the server