Customer of ours wanted to get to 112,000 community users and adopted many techniques to get there including buying lists of competitor developer networks, getting on competitor community to learn who the key influencers are, “spamming some of these lists”. They made the number with about 1 month to spare.

Nate had a good question on Future of communities.
“Take Facebook for example. They spammed the students at their
university over and over again to get a userbase. What you do with that
userbase once it’s there is related to the question above. But how you
get them there in the first place? Now that’s a question I’d like to
see an ethical answer to (that works).”

Do you think they did whatever it took to get to the goal? They did not do anything illegal, but then again.