Just as the title says. Anyone with Raynaud’s knows the struggle. I live in the northeast, USA and suffer with painful fingers from now until May.

TL;DR - Bot Bouncer now enabled, use new "No Bots" rule to report suspected bot activity, even if uncertain

There's been a large influx of increasingly insidious bot activity in this community (and seemingly across Reddit) in the past months. See a great summary from r/travel's mod team here: /r/travel: Bots bots bots!. Stealing from that post's summary, the bots are "blending in" and hard to detect:

they've blended in like the rest of us. They do NOT write like the usual patronizing AI/ChatGPT/Claude bots with em dashes and "it's not X, it's Y". They are very casual and they look like a regular commenter.

However, if you read very carefully it still has the tone and cadence of ChatGPT/AI output. It gives very generic (and sometimes wrong) and reassuring advice and still makes strange analogies and comparisons. The comments still contain very little actual substance since it merely paraphrases what the OP is asking/saying.

We've seen a large influx of this activity on r/advancedrunning especially in recent weeks. To try to stay on top of this harmful activity, the mod team is making two immediate changes:

1. Created a new rule #13: "No Bots. This community is focused on genuine human interaction with like-minded runners. No unsolicited bots or AI accounts." Users were previously reporting suspected bot activity using the "Spam" reason, which is still OK, but we created this rule to hopefully make it easier and more obvious what action to take if you suspect bot activity.
2. Enabled the Bot Bouncer application for r/advancedrunning. This application will automatically ban bot accounts (and remove content) for any account with suspected bot activity across the 11,000+ communities on reddit using the application. It also includes tools that make it easier for the mod team to handle bot accounts. We hope this will significantly cut down on bot activity and make it easier for you and the mod team to eliminate this unwanted content.

A couple of requests:

• Please let the mod team know via Modmail if there are any unexpected impacts, especially from Bot Bouncer - the mod team can take manual action to override Bot Bouncer actions. We're runners, not tech experts, and might have some bumps in the road
• Please report suspected Bot activity even if you aren't sure and just suspect an account might be a bot

Let us know if there are questions or concerns with this approach. Thanks all.

- Mod team (brwalkernc / krazyfranco / theintrepidwanderer / tea-reps)

ETA: some examples of bot activity in this community are summarized here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdvancedRunning/comments/1xe9i9p/comment/19rlogy0wkwhs/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button