I'm no longer a player at splinterlands, however it does have a special place in my heart as one of the first crypto games I played and enjoyed...

This bot situation has been ongoing for far too long with splinterlands and in all honesty it's easy enough to block these botnets as there's only a few of them (as in bot scripts being used) and there's many options to help block bots, especially today with advancements in machine learning and ai.

So, my day job is front end web developer and many times throughout my day job we are tasked with blocking bots from accessing a website / api. It's really not that difficult to do and even with the most advanced bots you can still block them. Cloudflare even has a membership the splinterlands team could join today and I guarantee the botnets running would be stopped tomorrow... @yabapmatt.sps take a look at https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/bots/what-is-bot-traffic/ and consider buying a plan... it'd be very cost effective and would take a lot of the work out for you. Another good tool to stop bots would be data dome: https://datadome.co/products/bot-protection/ again all managed for you and stops even the most advanced bots.

Here's a few simple methods you can use to block bots, if you don't want to pay for added cloudflare protection:

• Block or CAPTCHA outdated user agents/browsers (all modern browsers force auto-updates, and lots of botnets use older browsers for specific features)
• Block known hosting providers and proxy services (digital ocean, gigeNET, OVH, Choopa all blocked and make sure to require a captcha for amazon)
• Use tools to track mouse movement / page views (allows you to check for human behaviour)
• Block blank referrers
• Install honeypots for bots (by swapping key elements within the site such as function names, html, classes etc. you can trick the bots into trying to click on the wrong element which only a bot would do with 100% guarantee... also side effect = the botnet must constantly update itself to keep up)

If anyone from the splinterlands team wants to chat about this then let me know and we'll get this bot problem resolved easy peasey.

@everyone please get this seen by the right people... literally as soon as they buy the bot protection plan the game is saved from bots... and if they don't want to pay for protection then the above list should still be some good basic starting points and I can list more if necessary.