There are many bots here, several hundred I would guess, if not more. They used to get auto-deleted from not making an approved introductory post, but we might have lost that capability when we switched over to XenForo's platform. But they can't post anything on their own without staff approval, so they're mostly harmless aside from what any lurker/stalker/data miner can do with publicly posted information. (Another topic in itself, and probably a major driver of people migrating their conversations to chat servers over forums these days, to avoid personal security or cancel culture concerns that public forums have more challenges defending against)
Most that I've seen here are either Russian or Vietnamese. The Vietnamese bots seem to just be creating profiles to display advertising. Probably nothing to do with us as a group, maybe just someone selling so-called "marketing services" to uneducated entrepreneurs by saying they'll post ads to some number of sites without disclosing that they're just creating random forum profile pages to host ads no one will ever see rather than using an actual ad network.
The Russian bots periodically log in under a variety of names using the formula of some Slavic name + three random letters - for example,
Ivanofn was the one visiting here today after the Russian Security Council meeting was publicized, but I've seen many others. They don't anything publicly visible that I can see (but I'm not a staff member so there might be things others see that I don't), but they keep coming back which is kind of creepy. But it's possible they might just have bad AI that can't judge between game content being discussed versus real world discussions. Like, I play as Orthodox faith in Crusader Kings 2, which encompasses a lot of Slavic territory on the game map, so maybe those bots get tripped up on me posting about being the Byzantine Empress of the Crimean Peninsula, or something silly like that.
EDIT: And then right after I posted this,
Ivanpsr decided to show up. (Not to be confused with the previously mentioned "Ivanofn") Just random coincidence I'm sure.
So anyways,
@Shavy26, bots are a real thing here so please don't take it personally. We're glad you're here, but as others have mentioned, the Discord channel is probably the better place for socializing these days.