SRL Archive - Bot Information and Spottings

I'm curious what the current state of 'bot sense' is, or in other words, what the general RS community thinks about whether bots are highly prevalent, extinct, in between, etc.

Back in the day before bot bust/ban waves/whatnot, everyone was on hyper lookout for bots, because they were so common. Be somewhat AFK and you could be accused of botting. Train a skill with chat off and you could've been easily reported.

Nowadays, I've found it's very different. I was babysitting while botting one day, not chatting at all, and people would be trying to make conversation with me occasionally. I would be clearly ignoring everyone while actively doing tasks (so not logically AFK), and the conversation went as follows (they were talking about me):

Person 1 "is that guy botting?"
Person 2 "dude bots were all banned ages ago, he's prob got chat off"
Person 3 "yeah he could be watching tv or something"

Lol. Thanks for covering my ass Persons 2+3.

When playing legit with other players (PvM, mini games, etc) I get more and more hints of this "bots are mostly gone" attitude.

I think this is pretty cool…because it actually acts as an indirect anti ban. Most of the color based bot bans are due to manual reports (or terrible 0 anti ban scripting, I guess? but ignoring that) since they aren't to my knowledge directly detectable with an automated system like the other injection/reflection clients.

Is this generally true, or have I just been lucky?

I would agree that bots are no longer on the average player's mind the way they were in the days of essence miners, yew cutters, green dragon fighters, and what have you. They're no longer going around asking themselves whether everyone they see is a bot. But, they're still aware bots exist (in the abstract, not necessarily specifics) and if you started behaving wrong enough (i.e. clearly not AFK, clearly not performing anything useful, clearly not behaving sensibly for a hypothetical human) people will still begin to question/accuse you. So, my overall impression is that if your script is successful, people will not suspect you. If your script fails in externally visible ways, expect some reports.