Credit to Peter99 and cloudtrapezer for seeing through this from the start.

A review of vikalina's and rekata's post histories makes the game pretty clear: a sustained campaign of low-value posts on multiple threads by two accounts over the course of a week, all for the ultimate purpose of inserting a single mention of Mana*emart into the forums. I have to admit that it's actually impressive in a twisted sort of way.

@herenow, may I ask how knowledgeable are you on SEO and SERP in general?

@vetimo: I think jumping conversations across threads like this (from the "Thai visa for foreigners in Kunming" thread) causes more trouble than it solves. Notably by causing confusion and by reviving this thread to clutter up the forums home page. Probably better to continue conversations where they organically emerge.

So I am going to decline to respond further on this thread. Feel free to ask me your question on the original thread.

That's fine, just listen don't respond. =)

If my web developing/webmaster hobby days have taught me anything, the more we give suspecting spammers obsessive scrutiny by making multiple Google searches from various IPs of their meta keywords, the more likely their name rises in search engine results pages. So @herenow, you've become their unknowing champion/enabler lol.

Like you said, the one 'ManageFart' word everyone dreads spelling out is still sitting pretty, waiting for Googlebots to hoist them to the glorious summit of zeros and ones (though unlikely)... if that's any indication our mass hysteria of conspiracy theories and second guessing are futile.

Btw, GoKunming needs to adjust their Cloudflare security level up from medium to high to curb daily breach of Chinese spambots in the forums. But this move may compromise GoKunming's own unique visitor page hits, thus ad revenues, despite bolstering the site's security. Consequently, our mods choose painstaking manual deletions instead of activating Spiderman's auto "kill mode" on their CDN server.

There's a plethora of free SEO plugin tools can be be deployed to do all the tedious ranking optimizations automatically in the ether. Far less laborious for alleged culprits, if in fact they are human agents.

Quantifiable keywords of quality content weren't clearly presented in this thread to effectively feed the algo. A quick Google search of this amateur programmer's pet project, their website tapers off after a few pages. Their product isn't present in popular software depositories due to its irrelevancy. If you run an analysis of their website, they're not doing so hot. In fact, their traffic net worth deserves our sympathies not resentment. The handful of daily unique visitors are mostly generated by bots that crawl into every known website regardless.

If you peruse the archives, it was @cloudtrapazer's repeated, mistaken suspicion of new poster @sezuwupom (who turns out to be legit) that snowballed the entire thread into collective paranoia.

Lastly, I would still give OP benefit of doubt as show of goodwill. However if I'm wrong, then best of luck cause they'll need it. Imagine your parent was the site owner who programs day and night in order to pay off mortgage debt to feed the family... only to be engaged in futile sunk cost of a failed endeavor.

More compassion for our aggravators may calm own inner state.

I don't disagree with most of what you wrote. Just a couple of points.

@vetimo wrote "So @herenow, you've become their unknowing champion/enabler lol."

I searched once on DuckDuckGo -- I don't think that changes much in the scheme of things.

@vetimo wrote "Quantifiable keywords of quality content weren't clearly presented in this thread to effectively feed the algo."

My understanding is that for canonical company names (where they are identifiable), the algorithm looks at the general profile of their usage across the web. If virtually every mention of the name is closely associated with a link to the associated site and with a tightly-optimized set of keywords, that constitutes an artificial SEO-driven profile and results in a SERP penalty. Whereas the existence of a moderate number of "un-optimized" linkless mentions of the name (as here) indicates a natural profile and thus contributes to promotion on the SERP.

In this kind of long con marketing effort the initial question itself has to have some kind of merit, otherwise it fails to begin with.

If the thread then continues to produce meaningful answers (that often may be competitive to the original marketing attempt), it really stops mattering that the original intent was somehow foul.

There would be information relevant to the OP in the thread, and it deserves high search ranking.

So my opinion is that if someone asks a question and you have answers, you don't need to speculate why the question was asked. And if you don't have anything relevant to that question to say...

The questions asked in these cases to date are blatantly moronic. They detract from and undermine the forums, partly for the above reason and partly because they are not in good faith.

The existence of answers doesn't validate the questions. People are answering because they are kinder and more polite than the questions deserve.

My point was not that the answers would validate the questions.

Rather, the questions validate the subsequent answers. For example in this case the two first answers from tigertiger and AlPage48 were quite to the point.

If someone looks for software for catering business, those answers are valid.

Your comment indicates that some questions (and answers) may not belong on the specific forum at all, but that is a different issue, and for which (to my knowledge) there is no official policy from the owners of this forum.

Posts about posts about posts. Meta-meta posts

@JanJal: We have different understandings of the meaning of the word "validate".

And you seem to think it's fine that spammers are polluting the forums with moronic bad-faith questions that make people cynical and thus less likely to answer legitimate future questions. Well, I disagree.

@JanJal wrote: "If someone looks for software for catering business, those answers are valid."

When future GoKunming users are looking for catering software, they are not going to search on the GoKunming forums. If they have a grain of sense in them, they will use a search engine. So those answers will likely never provide value to anyone.