Big Bot Tracker

Big Bot Tracker is a World of Warcraft Retail and Classic addon that monitors Trade and Services chat for suspicious repeated advertising patterns.

It does not prove that someone is botting. It does not auto-report players, post accusations, block chat, or send public messages. It shows evidence so you can review the pattern yourself.

What It Does

• Watches Trade and Services chat, ignoring your own messages
• Tracks chatters by normalized character-realm
• Promotes local candidates only after signals such as repeated templates, near-duplicate wording, regular timing, or high volume with ad-like behavior
• Shows timing, content reuse, activity, persistence, current-channel baseline, and network context
• Keeps local evidence and network evidence separate
• Uses transparent heuristic scoring, not machine learning or external services

Message count alone is not treated as suspicion. Network sync can create Preliminary network-only entries, but peer evidence does not raise a local score, confidence, or tier.

Report Window

Open the report with /bbt, /bbt open, /bbt show, /bigbottracker, or the addon compartment button.

The table shows a watch toggle, character-realm, tier, score, confidence, first/last seen, message count, posts per hour, average interval, cadence, template reuse, and source: Local, Net, or L+N.

Selecting a row shows a plain-language assessment first, then detail sections for summary, activity, timing, content, local score breakdown, local channel baseline, peer evidence, and main signals. The assessment explains suspicion level and the strongest supporting metrics without treating the score as proof or a calibrated bot probability.

The timing detail uses user-facing terms: common intervals hide one-off low-signal buckets, tiny retained buckets display as <1% instead of 0%, and stable runs group repeated same-cadence phases so duplicate runs are easier to understand. Click headers to sort and hover rows or headers for field explanations.

Critical candidates show a Report button. It opens Big Bot Tracker's report assist and tries to open Blizzard's in-world report flow when a reportable player location is available. A successful report-frame open marks the candidate Reported locally, but you can clear that status from the assist window or candidate detail if the flow was opened by mistake or not completed. You must choose the Blizzard category, review or paste any text, and submit manually.

The report window defaults to the Active filter, which hides locally handled candidates. Handled means Reported or Ignored. The eye button marks a candidate Watched, keeping it visible in Active even if it is otherwise handled. These triage states are local, non-destructive display state only; they do not change score, confidence, tier, sync, or stored evidence.

Available filters:

• All shows every stored candidate
• Active shows unhandled candidates plus watched candidates
• Watched shows watched candidates
• Reported shows candidates marked reported
• Ignored shows ignored candidates

Other report controls:

• Refresh rebuilds the visible report
• Export saves a compact debug summary in SavedVariables
• Sync enables or disables evidence sharing
• Watch, Ignore, Mark Reported, and Clear Reported manage local triage state for the selected candidate
• Clear Buffers clears temporary unpromoted scan buffers
• Purge Selected deletes the selected candidate's saved evidence
• Purge All deletes saved candidate evidence

Scores and Privacy

Local scores are based on capped evidence families: timing regularity, content similarity, activity/bursts, persistence, and local channel baseline outliers. High and Critical tiers require multiple local evidence families, and confidence depends on local evidence volume and diversity.

The addon does not persist or sync raw chat text. Saved and synced data is compact: identity, observation ranges/windows, counts, timing summaries, template and shingle hashes, behavior summaries, score snapshots, baseline bins, hashed peer IDs, and version fields.

Sync does not join or create custom chat channels. When enabled, it uses hidden WoW addon-message transports for guild and group members who also run Big Bot Tracker. If no guild or group transport is available, sync waits without changing the user's chat channels.

Sync starts local-only. On first run, a notice lets you enable hidden guild/group sharing or keep the addon local; /bbt sync on and /bbt sync off can change that later.

Commands

• /bbt, /bbt open, /bbt show, or /bigbottracker opens the report
• /bbt status prints tracked candidate and sync status
• /bbt sync on enables sync
• /bbt sync off disables sync
• /bbt monitor trade on|off toggles Trade monitoring
• /bbt monitor services on|off toggles Services monitoring
• /bbt export writes a compact debug summary to BigBotTrackerDB.settings.lastDebugSummary
• /bbt clear buffers clears temporary runtime scan buffers
• /bbt debug on
• /bbt debug off

Install

Install via CurseForge, or copy the BigBotTracker folder into the appropriate game client's Interface/AddOns/ directory.

Common local install roots include _retail_, _classic_, _classic_era_, _classic_tbc_ or _anniversary_ for TBC Anniversary installs, and _classic_titan_ for Titan Reforged.

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Codecrete. All rights reserved.

Big Bot Tracker is proprietary software. The source is visible because World of Warcraft addons must be distributed as visible Lua code, but this project is not open source and does not grant permission to copy, modify, redistribute, rehost, sublicense, or create derivative works without prior written permission.