Happy Birthday, Forum SpamBots!

In deal­ing with spam­bots as the admin­is­tra­tor of a cou­ple phpBB forums, I’ve noticed that most of them, when reg­is­ter­ing, give the birth­date of March 28, 1983. I thought there might be some expla­na­tion for this con­sis­tency — like the Jan­u­ary 1, 1970 dat­ing of phan­tom phpBB posts — but a Google search for “march 28 1983″ only turns up threads on var­i­ous forums men­tion­ing the coin­ci­dence, with­out offer­ing any explanation.

I did find out that these spam­bots are likely the prod­uct of XRumer, a spam­ming tool, so my guess is that March 28, 1983 is the default value of a con­fig­urable birth­date, but I’m not really inter­ested in installing it to find out.