Lately the Honorbuddy forums have been seeing a lot of 72 hour suspensions for the use of Third Party Automation Programs and Exploitation of the Economy.  Personally I believe that many of the Automation bans are automated (i.e. your account gets flagged for not turning in any quests while not lv.80 etc.), while the Exploitation of the Economy are the result of player reports.  These bans do not constitute a Banwave nor does it mean that Honorbuddy has been detected by Warden, so I have decided to post some general tips to botting safely.

First and foremost do not Bot on an account that you can't afford to lose.  No matter what safety features are included with your bot there is ALWAYS the chance that Warden will detect the bot and your account will be flagged and banned.

Bot smart.  Do not use public profiles, instead use profiles you have made yourself.  There is nothing more obvious than 7 bots running in the same area, killing the same mobs, getting stuck in the same places.  Using a public profile is basically begging to be caught.  Now I will add one caveat.  If you are using the beta questing version of Honorbuddy then by all means use the public profiles out there.  Most people who think you're a botter will check your armory to see if you've been questing.  If you have some questing achievements they are less likely to believe you're a bot.

Use some form of auto-responder or alarm, weather it's AIMLbot or KingReply for Honorbuddy.  Personally I rarely leave my bots AFK.  When I do I set an alarm to sound when I get a whisper, there are many add-ons for wow that you can use to do this.  I have also used an AIMLbot addon for Glider that was great, but there hasn't been a very stable release of it for Honorbuddy yet.  Kingreply is an app that sends whatever is whispered to your sms enabled cellphone, and you can reply from your phone.  Seems like a good app, though I have yet to really use it.

Do not AFK bot on High Pop servers or at Peak time.  This just raises the chance of your bot will be reported by another player.


Check your bots Ban or Security forums daily, this can save you from a ban during a detected period.

Lastly I will reiterate what I said at the beginning.  Do not bot on an account that you can't afford to lose (read that as your main account.)  If you do happen to get banned, do the right thing and post a coherent report on your chosen bots Ban forum detailing what you were doing and any other third party apps you might have been using besides the bot.