It looks like the humans are winning this one!
(Have to say I don't know what bots are out there, but I think I'll give it a try and look up a few things.)
I'm only aware of two bots at the moment. There is the Bitmixer bot and then there is marcotheminer's bot which was directly based on the Bitmixer bot (
link). Marco sells his bot to signature campaign operators who then customize it according to their needs. Stunna's plan to reopen/relaunch the PD campaign was supposed to include a bot as well but I'm not sure what happened to that.
I've had some experience with the Bitmixer bot and it definitely seemed that using a bot made things much easier for the operator. Despite (or perhaps due to) the fact that almost everything was automated, most of the participants there were quite satisfied with the campaign and everything worked fairly smoothly. Other campaigns (which I won't mention here) also use similar bots but it seems their experiences weren't quite so trouble-free.
Bots are probably cheaper, I would assume, since there is no need to pay for a separate campaign manager. Bots on the other hand are probably easier to take advantage of as well. And even with a bot, a little bit of work might still be required for checking posts, making adjustments to the bot, responding to queries, etc.
Which one do you think is better for managing a signature campaign? And when choosing a signature campaign to join, which option would you personally prefer?
EDIT: Added a poll as per twister's suggestion.
A bot can be great if he can do all the Job. But is hard to trust in a bot for checking posts, i think that is the hard part.
Is the first time i read about bots on the signature campaigns, i like the concept, could be fun to make my own bot for that.
At last i think is better a bot, but a full implemented one, at the point where you only need to send founds and he do all the job
The Bitmixer bot probably comes closest to that description. Registration, counting of posts, and even sending of payments are all done automatically with no input from the owner. In fact, the owner himself rarely posts on the forums but since everything is automated, problems are usually quite rare.