@casandrarose There's a couple of things. First off, it's intentionally a bit complex. The procedures involved are too complicated to make it worthwhile for a bot to attempt to play.
Secondly, if the bot is able to make insightful commentary then perhaps that's not a bad thing. However insightful commentary requires insight and almost no one has that level programming capability.

It would require understanding not only the concepts of the blog being commented in, but also the concepts of the source blog and how it might relate.

A bot isn't going to be able to do this and the reward for doing it is a bunch of minnows coming to vote, which might generate a dollar for the owner. However if it's spamming everywhere it's going to be readily visible just like it is now.

Ok so to play, first of all you start your blog post with #payitforward as the first word
Then you fill in your content and assign other tags and categories as per normal.

Submit your post then go hunting for other players. They will stand out because their content will start with #payitforward

Once you find the player, then you read their blog, say something insightful, and link back to your own blog, finishing your comment with #payitforward

When they come and say something insightful then they end with #payitforward

Finally, you respond to their comment in your blog giving a one or two sentence reaction and a little bit of content information that could help someone looking at it decide if it's something they might be interested in looking at too.

That's it and just make sure you follow the 5 rules!

Thanks for stopping by and I'm glad to have you here!