&gt; I think a new killer app would be a form of automated shill-detection for forums... the trouble would be reducing the false positives to zero.<p>An interesting idea for AI! Although, the domain knowledge and contextual information required to classify a poster as say, &quot;normal vs. astroturfer&quot;, might be too great, and vary from topic to topic. Also, there&#x27;s the question of how positive &#x2F; negative training examples would be obtained - who&#x27;s going to admit to the ground-truth labels for the &quot;astroturf&quot; class, for example?