Tracking YouTube bots

[AustinCullar]

On 10/2/2024, I identified a bot account on a Rocket League video:

channel id: 
custom URL: @emmathoms-b2m2m

The account was left a very generic bot comment:
"I'm very happy to be subscribed to your channel. You make really high quality and interesting content.⛴🌕💗"

The account had a profile pic of a woman on a beach, and the description appeared to be advertising another YouTube link.

Since I can't be sure where this link leads to, I did not click it.

I'm interested in this bot because it is still not banned as of 10/21/2024. The account was created on 10/2/2024, the date I originally found it, so it has been up for nearly 3 weeks.

It occurs to me that Astro could track 'known bot accounts' over time to see how long it takes them to get banned. It may be as simple as querying the 'custom URL' field and verifying that a 404 is not returned.

The identification of bots will still have to be manual at this point, but I could build a text file of 'known bots' along with my rationale for identifying the account as a bot. I think it could be interesting to try the following process with many suspected bot accounts.

1. Identify bot account
2. Add account to tracking list, add supporting rationale
3. Report the account to YouTube (spam/scams/etc)
4. Add option to Astro to have it loop through the bot account list, checking to see if any of them have been banned
5. Note the uptime of each bot account to get an idea of how long it takes YouTube to ban bots