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Meet a spammer

Let me start by a warning, This blogpost has nothing to do with howtoblog and is a story of a spammer.

Years ago we had to face a spammer in the forum(Probably during Pistachio?) who was very persistent. He was a link dropping spammer who kept sharing his blog URL under every reply in the forum and somewhere to his blogposts which merely had instructions from Blogger Help Centre.

It went as,
Thanks and Regards,
HIS NAME
HIS BLOG URL
Probably it was so difficult for TCs to make him go away as I happened to see him for months, spamming in the forum and one fine day he disappeared and never returned.

I happened to find him and interview him which I am writing down here,
So what happened to him?

Probably TCs reported him to the authority? He got locked out of his account and got the message, 
Your account is blocked for spam. Please appeal to get your account back.
He then appealed and had a long week recovering the account. Then he started reading about spamming and actually understood what does a spam mean. He said, 
I was new to the Internet and definitely to the forum. How would I know even a term called SPAM?
Fair enough question for a newbie. Isn't it? He abruptly stopped sharing his blog links and he continued to help users at the forum. Then he got a mentor, then TC +Chuck Croll.
One good thing about Chuck is he was never easy going. Meaning, he's very straight forward
the spammer mentioned.

As days passed, the spammer turned out to be a good helper at forum, became inactive due to personal reasons and 3 years later he again started contributing to the forum. After almost 10 months of contribution, he got promoted to be a Google Rising Star(now Silver product expert) at Blogger and Google Photos.

He attended the Top Contributor Program Meetups 2016 @ Google, Hyderabad. He added,
It was one of my dreams to attend this meetup when I started with blogger.
He chuckled and said,
In fact, the fun fact I mentioned about myself during the meetup was that I was a spammer when I got started
He became a Google Top Contributor(now Gold Product expert) months after the meetup at Blogger and then at Photos and is still a TC.

This transformation of Spammer to TC(like Rags to Riches) became possible only because I got the right mentor and right environment. Had at least one of the TCs raised concern about my promotion to a Rising Star just because I was a spammer then, I wouldn't have been what I am today.

Yes, the spammer I interviewed is myself and I used to tag under all forum replies as follows,
Thanks & Regards,
Kesava Krishnan .M
http://www.krishnainfotron.blogspot.com
Thanks to Chuck Croll and all other TCs who helped me in making it possible.

To Spammers out there: If at all you are sharing your blog links without knowing you are spamming, stop it and continue helping. A day will come when you'd have the authority to post links to your blog at forum and you'll definitely be responsible.

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