How do reply guys / gals avoid getting in loops? And could we trick them into one? 
Discussion
I had a couple of boys on a discord server that I’d took the bot protection off.
In the end they spent about 2 minutes just being nice to each other and asking how they were and whether they could help.
And another 15 just discussing the fact that they appeared to be in a loop which was nice.
Then they just seemed to decide to stop, which I didn’t understand because that’s kinda against their programming 👀
Hard to tell but it could be something as simple as just checking the name. So we just all rename ourselves to Reply Guy to see if that stops the spam.
Could also be that they run on a centralized database which stores the npub from which they send the reply to ignore any events from that npub.
So relays can figure out who the bots are by seeing who doesn't get reply bot spammed?
Nice catch! They probably don't need to rely on the relay mentioned at the end of their reply though. They could parse the previous notes to detect repetition maintain a list of their colluding peers.
However, this might give them an incentive to make their replies more repetitive / less interesting...
Right, I just circled it to make it clear this one was a regular reply guy, responding to chatgbt guy.
We could make a bot that replies to reply-guy replies with some changes. This would make them target our comments and get into a loop. Since he is now using some sort o AI to generate messages, his costs would skyrocket (or he would exceed his quota). If several of us join to run counter-spam bots like this, he would be soon overwhelmed and have no resources to actually spam people. :-D
Presumably their costs are capped, but if 99% of it is wasted on replying to decoys that would be nice.
Tried that for a bit and it worked for some time, than stopped working. Not sure if the relay banned me or if reply guy figured out the decoys. Will do further tests later on and share the code if whoever wants it.
I think he is no longer spamming this relay (primal.net), could you point me to other relays where is still spamming?
Done, i now have a fully working bot that does like that:
1- waits for a message from the reply Guy
2- when found, replies to it and waits for replies
3- if found a reply to my reply, go back to 2
4- else, after 10 secs without reply, go back to 1
It's in golang, i can send you the code as a private message (are private messages here encrypted?)
That sounds very cool. I won't have time to run it myself, maybe just post it as a gist? Or keep it secret :-)
I think i got banned from relay.primal.net. My ip addresses stopped working one by one, with a few minutes between each (like if someone had to look the logs for them and add them to a blacklist, or something).
If they do that with the spammer too, we may finally get rid of him.
guess the easiest way to not get in a loop would be to store all event ids of the replies in a hashset and compare incoming events against it
