in my opinion anything like that is not something that I personally think is good for any website/forum, since in the end you tend to piss off alot of people who might have joined your site because they liked the idea of what you were offering.

Programs like that can be tracked and lead back to you or your site, shutting your site down and getting you and everyone who affiliates with you banned from google, which hurts a site more then anything else.

No matter how you look at it you are still spamming people through a messenger and it might not be illegal right now but if enough people complain about it, then it does become a type of spam that could get you in trouble. Also, in someways and Harro can correct me on this violates what Forum Affiliates stands for.

I somewhat agree with you on all of this. Anyone with a site that has a good ranking on any of the search engines would never use a type of program like this. It does seem that alot of less reputable sites that are selling something and have not been around for long do use this type of thing just to get some traffic coming in. Seems to me that alot of pay-cam sites use this they of guerrilla marketing technique because I see the ads every time I log into a chat room on Yahoo.