Question

Ideas on preventing a bot-invasion.

If you ever played an online game where people chat a lot you might notice that some people make annoying 'bots' that spam.

One of my favorite games (Town of Salem) is currently undergoing a bot invasion and as hard as they've tried to counteract the bots. They failed over and over.

Imagine questioncove's chatboxes being flooded with racist messages and once an account is banned. A new one is created. That's what it feels like in Town of Salem.

So HOW DO YOU STOP THEM?

Here's what the developers of the Town of Salem did:
1. Captcha for account creation
2. Banning certain phrases that are being spammed
3. Moderators instantly banning people even pretending to be bots.
4. ip-banning bots (botmakers used VPN and once a whole univeristy ip was banned)

No they did not implement email-verification but if they did the bot makers can make random emails.

Basically the bot makers make new accounts themselves and used an auto-hotkey script to run them.

Do you guys have any ideas on how to counteract these bots?
P.S. imo these situations only happen after a community becomes toxic.

Answer 1

I mean there is no direct way imo since idk how they are made but you could restrict chatting for new users, capping off amount of messages sent per min, once they reach a certain level (assuming it should be hard to achieve maybe allow chatting?)

I have no idea what the game structure is but this is my idea

Answer 2

Bots are human-made accounts. but the accounts presses buttons and types automatically.
Your idea is kinda good actually. Like you gotta be active for a certain amount of time before you can get bigger chatting privileges.