I can see where you are coming from.
However, the number of presumed spam/ad/bot accounts is still fairly manageable, as there are currently 8608 users registered (at least if the overview page is correct). A single person could monitor each and every account and make an educated guess on the validity of that account in a single work day (8 hours), though it would be an extremely unpleasant day (assuming that the person canāt use any tools, like searching for specific properties that most of those accounts share). After that, said person would then have to check daily on the new signups of the previous day, which would probably be around 5-10 minutes, which is manageable.
Anyway, there are a couple of problems with these accounts:
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They are abusing this siteās systems to gain profit at the expense of the user base. At best, they are doing straight advertisement, at worst, they are linking to malicious sites that will turn the userās machine into a bot upon visiting.
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Just from my personal point of view, there seems to be an increase in bot signups. Granted, this might be because I am now paying attention towards these, but if the number of bot signups per day increases, it might be a hint that the signup procedure isnāt doing a proper job of keeping bots at bay, and it might be in our best interest to fix that loophole as long as there arent actually millions of bots signed up.
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Each and every bot account can change its behaviour at the flick of a switch. Currently they are set to a fairly passive behaviour, where all they do is dump (potentially malicious) links in their bio and then like a couple of posts. What if, one day the creator of those accounts decides to use them to actively send posts into threads, whenever someone posts something? You then would be faced with hundreds of accounts posting malicious content, making proper discourse migh impossible (which is helped by the fact that the forums software developer actively spoke out against an āignore userā feature, arguing that they do this in order to force people to not just live in an echo chamber but also to consider the opinions that might be contrary to their own. All that, in order to improve the quality of discussions on this software)
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Their specific behaviour of liking posts undermines the feature that we are used to use in order to determine the quality of a post when skimming over a discussion. It also fills the notifications of those who get their posts like with junk. For example: Out of my 12 most recent notifications, 9 are posts liked by bots.
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The above points can have long-term detrimental effects to the forum. I remember being in forums that pretty much died, because the bots in there werenāt dealt with (either because the admins didnāt care or had left the community).
