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.