>>226201

 They're easy to spot. Most aren't too bright and they're given the same printout with a list of tactics (the main tactic they strive for is to piss anon's off. pissed anon's reply). The clowns and the shill factories know this. Their most successful tactic is flooding threads so that only 1 in every 10 or so posts is an anon. When they do that, it doesn't matter whether you know it's just shills and bots, it still effectively cripples the flow of information. They usually do this in the middle of the day when staffing is the cheapest, which is why owls have something to teach us here.

 The best way to deal with flooding by clowns is to not post text, just images of text. However, I don't think the white hats behind the scenes like that any better than the black hats because then searches of the archives have to be done manually. So while that may be good for conversations, any research findings should still be posted as text so that it can easily be found later.

 There are two different kinds of bots. Some bots are only posters, others are repliers. Repliers will only reply to bots and shill posts because they aren't capable of understanding conversations and appearing to be human. When a shill posts, bots will automatically reply 3-5 times. These bots are stupid, which is why when a bot posts a reply, one previous bot reply is deleted (to avoid duplicate comments). This is at least partially why you'll see a lot of deleted replies to shill posts, and why you'll find ID's in threads that have had all of their comments deleted.

 They used to employ bots that respond to human replies, but I think they got rid of them a few days ack because we learned to ID them by making them malfunction. If they reply to a post that they don't understand, they will include an image of a question mark with the word spoiler underneath. Whenever you see that, it means the bot couldn't parse the message it replied to.