Big Bot Tracker
Big Bot Tracker helps you spot chatters who behave like automated Trade or Services advertisers.
It watches Trade and Services chat, looks for repeated timing and message patterns, and shows a ranked report with evidence for each suspicious character.
Big Bot Tracker does not prove that someone is botting. It does not automatically report players, send accusations, block chat, or post anything publicly. It gives you a clear evidence report so you can decide what to do.
What It Tracks
- Repeated Trade and Services messages
- How often a character posts
- How regular their posting interval is
- Whether their messages reuse the same template
- Whether similar ads cluster even when words are rearranged
- Whether their cadence changes between multiple regular schedules
- Whether their behavior is unusual compared with the current monitored channel
- How long the behavior has been observed
- Whether other Big Bot Tracker users have shared matching evidence
The Report
Open the report with /bbt.
The main table shows:
- Character-realm
- Suspicion tier
- Score
- Confidence
- First seen
- Last seen
- Message count
- Posts per hour
- Average interval
- Cadence
- Template reuse
- Local/network evidence marker
Selecting a character shows more detail, including first seen, first suspected, active days, interval consistency, top interval buckets, robust timing variation, cadence switches, near-duplicate messages, evidence-family scores, current-channel baseline comparison, network sightings, network overlap context, and the top reasons behind the score.
Critical candidates also show a report button in the detail panel. It can open Blizzard's in-world report flow when the addon has a valid reportable player location. The addon does not submit reports automatically.
Scores and Confidence
The score is a bot-likelihood signal based only on local chat behavior. Confidence is shown separately so a small amount of evidence does not look as strong as a long-running pattern. Reloading or relogging does not increase score, confidence, or tier.
Big Bot Tracker uses transparent rules, not a black-box model. V1 scoring is grouped into capped evidence families:
- Timing regularity
- Content similarity
- Activity and burst behavior
- Persistence across time
- Current-channel baseline outliers
High and Critical tiers require multiple local evidence families. A single signal, such as template reuse alone or peer sightings alone, should not make someone look like a strong suspect.
Confidence is based on local message volume, valid interval samples, active observation windows, distinct observed days, and evidence-family diversity. It does not use addon sessions or reload count.
Examples of evidence include:
- "Median interval 121s with very low robust variation."
- "80% of messages match the top template."
- "Similar ad wording clusters even when text is rearranged."
- "Cadence changed between stable posting schedules."
- "Timing is more regular than 95% of monitored advertisers."
Sync and Privacy
Big Bot Tracker can share compact evidence summaries with other Big Bot Tracker users through a custom addon sync channel. Sync is enabled by default after a first-run notice and can be disabled at any time.
The sync network is not global. It only reaches players who can join the same custom channel, usually people on the same realm or connected realm.
Synced data does not include raw chat text by default. It sends compact evidence such as:
- Character-realm
- Observation time range
- Coarse observation windows
- Message count
- Timing summary
- Template hashes and counts
- Shingle cluster hashes and counts
- Behavior summary
- Anonymous peer ID
- Addon/schema/feature version
Network evidence is context only. It does not increase the local score or local confidence because peers may be seeing the same public chat messages.
Commands
/bbt opens the report/bbt status prints tracked candidate and sync status/bbt sync on enables sync/bbt sync off disables sync/bbt channel NAME changes the custom sync channel/bbt monitor trade on|off toggles Trade monitoring/bbt monitor services on|off toggles Services monitoring/bbt export writes a compact debug summary to BigBotTrackerDB.settings.lastDebugSummary/bbt clear buffers clears temporary runtime scan buffers/bbt debug on/bbt debug off
