I don't know if this is true or not, but I heard somewhere that simple/free backlinks that people post through comment sections and sometimes forums, wont actually count as backlinks. I feel this is a big hit on the spammers who just go on someone's blog or site and spam their links in the comment section. I got to tired of it that I usually just let it go.
I can't say I've heard of that either, but I haven't posted here in a while or elsewhere for a while so I wouldn't know. I think it's kind of dumb though, but I can see why some would be happy about this. I don't like them doing this though, because it just hurts the people who do fair advertising like this.
Google has changed their backlink policy and values only high quality backlinks. Low quality can actually hurt you now. So maybe spamming forums becomes uninteresting...
A lot of scammers hasn't noticed what damage they do to themselves yet. Not to talk about the damage they do to millions of blogs and forums out there. It costs a ton of money deleting all those stupid comments. I hope karma works...