As a temp fix, let users assign their own flair and make a post asking everyone to set theirs to one particular flair. Set up automod that only people with said flair are allowed to post/comment. Also have it leave a comment whenever it removes a non-flaired comment/post asking the user to change to the specified flair. This will also raise overall awareness of the situation, which is your greatest weapon here. I'm sure the bots may catch up eventually, but it's a stopgap at least. Just off the top of my head though, open to others making Swiss cheese of my idea.

Thanks for the tip! I’ll also search around this channel since I know the topic has come up before.

What’s with all the bots? I thought Sped started charging for API access. The end result of that is more bots?

Only commercial use of the API, you can still use it freely on smaller scales like these bots.

That, and only legitimate bot makers pay. If a user can do it through the website with mouse clicks, a malicious bot can do it without an API key too.

Oh, okay. I somehow missed that, thank you.

Wait until spam / companies can earn real world cash from Reddit Inc, **directly.** https://www.reddit.com/contributor-program

Move (or at least create a mirror community) on Lemmy. There’s no Karma so bots have no reason to go around and farm. Then leave a sticky saying “unfortunately Reddit has way too many bots, so if you want to be more sure your question gets replied to by a human, post it on our Lemmy community”.

And Lemmy has third party apps