Welcome to Gaia! ::

cool

if you have a 40k+ item and they offer cash get supicous i do all my trading through my mule.

Anything over 40k?
But...most donation items more than 4 months old are worth at least that.

You don't! xd They can generally be identified by suspicious behaviors. Repeating the same task/message over and over, things like that. If you think someone is a botter, you should PM an online moderator with a link to their profile. (And include information about why you think they're botting, etc.)


You don't need to worry about that. sweatdrop As long as you're not actually botting, or INTENTIONALLY profiting from a botter, your account should be fine. xd Personally, I would avoid anything that you feel is suspicious. (Specifically very large, one-sided trades from users that you have no on-site interactions with.) But, all honest trades and marketplace transactions are honored.

If you ever find yourself banned for botting, and haven't done anything wrong, you can appeal it through the 'contact us' link at the bottom of the page. surprised (Though - I don't believe that would ever happen, unless you give a mod/admin reason to believe you are botting, or directly profiting from botting.)

Fleep (one of the developers at gaia) had some random stuff in his gaia journal thing, though it's pretty old:
http://www.gaiaonline.com/journal/index.php?mode=view&p=4995949

And I think there might have been a small blurb of information about it in one of the old announcements or newsletters? (Can't remember exactly, they're all so old. xd )

Bots can be designed to be random, and human-like, and sometimes because you are working through a computer picking out artificial users can be tricky. If the coder wrote an automated bot that does the same thing over and over again with no variation, and does not change it up, it becomes easy to spot.

'I really like your avatar!', is a common phrase that bots are set too.

Now a good bot would do the following:

Open 'comments.txt'

Pick random line -> send message.

They would have it only do until the gold was sucked from the arena, and then it would refresh itself, and then search 'bump' in the forums, and start bumping bump threads. Once again with variation...

The next part of the bot would continue to refresh, and then it would go on doing that until all the gold is gone... log out, and stop.

Then continue with another bot account.

This would be pretty undetectable, and therefor you would really never know...

I'm just throwing that out there.... Bots are against ToS, and anyone with programming skills could make them, but this is against the purpose... its hard to cheat when you dont win anything.

There are a lot of comments in the arena that sure sound like they're from a badly programmed bot - made within minutes of each other, different accounts, and ALL with the same typos in them. Identical.

This is one of the reasons I prefer to sell in the Marketplace rather than the Exchange - the Marketplace puts some distance between me and anyone who wants to buy. Since I can't really control who buys my stuff, I can't be held responsible for them, either.

But like most places on this planet, if an offer seems too good to be true, it almost always is.

Thanks for the tips everyone!

I'm sure, if anyone has a problem or suspicion with botters, They can look here! ^^