I think spammers in the future may not use forums to spam as much in the future. I think most people who still use forums are less interested in checking out links which are posted on forums.
Spammers may spend more of their time posting links on social networks and blogs which have members who maybe more easily fooled into checking out a spammer sites. Social networks tend to have more new internet users like new internet users like kids who are 10 years old and up while forums have more members who are at the age of 20 and older.
There is also a chance that spammers don't know a forum exist, or can't easily find forums because search engine rankings tend to rank sites like Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and popular news sites higher in the search results compared to most forums which are usually on the 2nd page of search results.
Oh yeah there always have been spammers and will always be spammers, as the users get smarter and smarter the spammers get smarter and smarter and so does the software that the spammers use to spam the forums.
It will probably get worse. Its not like it takes effort for spammers, they usually create a tool which will allow forums to be spammed at a click of a button.
I agree, there would still be spammers. But, I think more spammers will move onto social networks because social networks are where most of the world's population spend their online time, and forums may get fewer human spammers.
Hard to tell. On the one hand, spammers tend not to really care about how much their 'content' gets viewed, with the only real goal being to trick advertisers and search engines. So they'll probably continue spamming even the least visited sites in the world.
At the same time however, I suspect less people are visiting forums now, so social media sites might become the main targets for them rather than forums and blogs. So yeah, could swing either way.
I feel spamming may slowly become a less profitable way of making money in the future since more people will know what is spam, and not to go on spam websites, and many antivirus block people from going on spam websites.
Search engines, social networks, and web hosts sometimes punish websites who spam by lowering their website search result ranking, or shutting down their site if spam is against their web hosts terms of service.
If spam become less profitable, fewer spammers may spam forums.
