I have suggested this in the witness channel, and now I am bringing it up on Steemit to see if this has any potential at solving the spam bot issues.

<center>http://mergy.org/wp-content/uploads/lead_form_spam_bot.jpg</center>

First I would like to note that fighting bots with bots is potentially an unending war and will cause more spam TX on the blockchain than it would without. Hiding the spam bot posts, is merely sweeping your problem under the rug.

If we add a command that allows the active witnesses to flag a certain account for spam and cause a suspension of the account posting authority for 30 days by making that account's bandwidth zero for that time period. 

We would require at least 15 of the 19 active witnesses to execute the flag command for the suspension to occur. This will prevent accidental suspensions as more witnesses will have to investigate these accounts before issuing the flag.

This will be a blockchain based solution, and I am not sure if it can be done. But there is very little chance of abuse. On the other hand, this can be done with a reputation system as suggested, but is this reputation system blockchain based?  or is it the equivalent of appointing mods on Steemit?

I would also like to know what is Steemit's policy towards bots in general, not only spam bots. Are all bots considered villains? 

There are spam bots, anti spam bots, plagiarism detection bots, curation bots, comment bots, and soon stats bots and many more. What is the determining factor, with spam bots it's easy to distinguish, but what about the rest?


Joseph