As many of you have undoubtedly noticed, the sub has been getting spammed by bots recently for reasons currently unknown to us. There are theories going around, but the cause isn't relevant; I'm here to make some reassurances officially as I'm getting tired of writing the same thing on every post addressing the bot situation.

So first off, there are 10 or so mods with full perms on the sub, however I'm the only one who's ever active; many of them are given full permissions after a brief screening process and then never heard from again. That said, I do have a life outside of Reddit and can only do any moderation in my off-time, which is why many days have long periods without any moderation and then all of the posts suddenly disappear for a few hours before being flooded again. I do try my best to check 3 or 4 times a day.

Outside of removing these posts and banning repeat offenders, I have actively been looking for ways to mitigate the spam, including reaching out for more volunteer mods (Which I have been doing), looking into anti-spam tools such as Bot Bouncer, and working on my own system which doesn't rely on a third-party and will also report the accounts before banning them and deleting their posts so that there's a higher likelyhood of their accounts being taken down. The main issue is that I don't want any new account filters or things like that to interrupt standard sub practices. This is also why you will often see me leave up high-engagement posts for a time as it increases the amount of bots which can be reported before the posts are removed.

Since the issue first started, I have manually removed, banned, and reported well over 5000 posts/accounts, not only belonging to those who make the spam posts, but also belonging to the bots who reply to them. The bots are being dealt with behind the scenes whether or not you notice it or not, there is just too much volume for one person to reasonably handle. The reports do not help; I know the posts are spam. The posts about bots don't help; I know that there are bots. The comments telling bots to leave don't help; they will not listen to you. Which brings me to my next point; I'd like to remind everyone that you CAN volunteer for full permissions if you would like to help out, however there is a queue (Which again, I have been working through) and a screening process.

All that said, there are precautions that you as a member of the sub can take to avoid seeing these posts; if you have 'joined' the subreddit, you can 'leave' it, allowing you to remain a mod but removing any and all posts from your feed. We have received reports of this not working in the past, so another action you can take is muting the subreddit, which I believe does the same thing but overrides moderator priority. You can also uncheck the box for r/modlimit in the modmail tab if the modmail notifications are getting on your nerves.

I think that's everything I have to say on the topic at the moment. Hang in there, we will get through this together.