Rules That Bots Can’t Follow

The single most important fact for rule-writing: you cannot police presence — police performance. Automation tools are perfectly present. They are online 24/7, they never miss a dig, they join rallies in milliseconds. Rules built on “be active” or “be online” are rules a bot passes with a perfect score. Rules built on the gaps in what the tools offer are rules a bot fails without ever knowing it failed.

First: what the tool actually does

Write rules against capabilities, not rumors. Consolidated from reverse-engineering work and public documentation (see the Field Log):

The gap list — what it never does

Every rule below lives in one of these gaps. The tool:

• never likes a chat message (emoji reactions only), and never sends stickers;
• never writes free-text chat, never answers a question, never posts a screenshot;
• never varies — its timing distributions are inhumanly tight, its schedule never breaks;
• never plays “wrong” — no misclicks, no idle drift, no being briefly AFK;
• can’t rotate — whatever pattern it follows today, it follows tomorrow.

The rules

1. The Sticker Salute all members · digs

Rule: after claiming a dig, drop any sticker on your own dig broadcast within 10 minutes. Emoji-only dig claims don’t count toward weekly dig credit.

Why it works: the tool’s humanizer fires an emoji and only an emoji. Liking and stickers aren’t in its feature surface — adding them means the vendor building UI-side interaction, which is exactly the fragile, detectable kind of automation they avoid.

Human cost: five seconds. Failure mode: a runner noticing the rule and manually sticker-ing — at which point they’re doing per-dig manual labor, which the tool was supposed to eliminate.

2. Like-to-Lock rally teams · KV/SVS prep

Rule: rally rosters lock from the plan message: to hold a slot, members must like (👍 reaction, not emoji) the officer’s plan post before doors. Likes are roster; joins are fill.

Why it works: the tool joins rallies in milliseconds but has never liked a post in its life. Machine-speed joins without a corresponding like is also a clean Argus signal.

3. The Callout Roster fixed-time events

Rule: 30 minutes before fixed-time events, attendance is taken by replying with the phrase of the day — an odd word or short phrase the officers pick and post that day (“purple tortoise”, a sticker description, anything unpatterned).

Why it works: the phrase is unguessable in advance and changes every event, so no scheduler can pre-program it. Free-text chat is outside the tool’s surface.

Enforcement note: rotate who posts the phrase and when, so the pattern can’t be learned even statistically.

4. The Human Variance Rule all members · weekly review

Rule: perfect participation is a flag, not a badge. Any member with 100% dig coverage across a full week (including 03:00–06:00 server) gets a friendly check-in before any credit reflects in leaderboard rewards.

Why it works: humans miss. A week with zero misses across all hours is statistically louder than a confession. Framed as a check-in, it’s respectful; framed as a leaderboard gate, it removes the 24/7 incentive that drives auto in the first place.

5. The Receipt Rule spend-all / hoard-dump events

Rule: top-10 finishers in spend-all events post a cropped screenshot of their own event report in #receipts, with server time visible.

Why it works: screenshots require hands on the actual client. The tool doesn’t compose and post images; a runner doing it manually is fine — that’s a human winning with human effort, which is all the rule wants.

6. Fair Windows for Stations officers · station shops

Rule: cross-server station purchases happen inside announced 10-minute windows only; members who consistently own the shop in the first second after rotation owe the alliance a rotation skip. Purchases outside windows are visible in shop logs and get walked back socially before they get walked back formally.

Why it works: the tool’s station buyer fires at the rotation instant with spread-bursts — a timing signature no human matches. The rule doesn’t ban buying; it bans impossible buying.

7. The Buddy Ledger PvP seasons · kill events

Rule: kill surges get matched against shared march activity and battle reports. Members must be able to name their kill partner and tile on request — farming kills on a fixed tile pair between two owned accounts is the tool’s signature, and “who were you fighting?” is an unautomatable question.

8. Helper-Account Disclosure all members

Rule: any second account inside the alliance gets disclosed to R4 privately. Undisclosed multi-boxing is a kick offense — not for having a farm account, for hiding it. Helper clones distort help/reinforce stats and, worse, are the usual on-ramp to full auto farming.

9. Quiet Hours Don’t Count leaderboards

Rule: digs claimed 03:00–06:00 server time are excluded from weekly dig credit and leaderboard rewards.

Why it works: it surgically removes the value of the tool’s best hours. The 3am sniping still “works,” it just stops paying — which flips the cost-benefit for the marginal user (see Psychology).

Quick reference