Annoying PM's

[redietz]

What's up with the weird PM's that are mostly punctuation marks?  And what's the sender trying to achieve?

That's your computer (or the software that powers this site) trying to interpret unicode as ASCII. The original was either in a non-Roman alphabet (like Chinese) or a Roman alphabet with lots of diacritical marks (like Vietnamese.) It's just spam, pure and simple.

Another fly fishing forum which I follow (and which recognizes unicode) gets a lot of spam in Vietnamese. It's always trying to sell cinnamon as health food. Nothing particularly sinister, just useless.