It is and isn't. This instance is built around an old school style BBS with public access to a Unix cluster. We post on the BBS to get admin attention.
A simple thing that may help a lot is for all new accounts to be flagged as bots, requiring opt out of the status for normal users. It's a small thing, but any barrier is one more step a bot farm has to overcome.
To be fair, we are at a point where most users will never need to program anything as most needs are already met by existing work. The whole "there's an app for that" marketing had a lot of truth to it.
No. It's steering toward theocracy. Thanks, Jerry fucking Falwell - may you rest in piss. The whole horror of what the US is living in now is thanks to that one greedy fuck. He was potentially going to lose money over desegregation because of properties he owned. His bright idea? Get evangelical Christians involved. It worked. This whole thing cascades into modern conservatism. Before Falwell got involved, most people considered abortion to be a Catholic issue. This fuck decided that involving evangelicals would once again make him money, so he used them. This is just the most blatant example of how things have gone. Laws have been written based on the bible as a sole source for at least 60 years, and the people involved thoroughly believe that it is the only acceptable moral or ethical code. The amount of laws that attempt to legally enforce a protestant idea of Christianity every day is insane. Thanks, Jerry, for sending the US down the path of Theocracy. We're nearly there - maybe another three years!
I don't know. I'll ask when I can get back to my PC. Using termux on my phone for that is unusable clunky for me.