Bot

Botting is the act of using a program to automatically refresh pages or perform other actions on gaiaonline.com such as posting, polling, or playing games without need of being at a computer. While botting can gain users large sums of gold with minimal effort, it is against Gaia's TOS and will result in permanent banning of all accounts involved.

Types
The most common form of botting on Gaia is the use of an automated program to refresh a webpage on a timer, gaining the botter gold from lurking. A common program used for this purpose is the autorefresh add-on for Mozilla Firefox.

Other forms of botting include the use of a program to automatically post bumps or other messages on a timer set to avoid Gaia's flood control feature, and programs set to control Gaia's flash games such as fishing or slots.

Consequences
If found guilty of botting, a user's account will be permanently banned (the exception being if an appeal is put in and accepted). Any other users who have received large amounts of gold in trades from the botter without giving anything in return are considered suspects as well and are judged by the moderators to be guilty or innocent. Profiting from botted gold will also result in an immediate permaban.

Controversy
Some time in mid 2006, Gaian security increased dramatically, resulting in a large number of botters and users profiting from botted gold being banned. While this was a good thing because it stopped many users from unfairly becoming rich and flooding the economy with mass amounts of gold (which then results in inflation), a problem arose in which users who unknowingly received botted through a donation to their quest or some other means were suddenly at risk of being banned without knowing they had broken the TOS. Since it is a difficult task to sort out whether or not a user knowingly participated in botting, the gaia admins then began accepting appeals to bannings in which a user could request that their case be looked over and, potentially, their ban repealed. Since this was a new feature, a wave of banned gaians flocked in to appeal their accounts, resulting in a large backup in the system. Due to a low ratio of moderators to appeals being sent in, it could take anywhere from the posted 7-14 days to several months for an appeal to be processed.