Darn, I really thought submission rates were the lowest hanging fruit for bot detection, and it doesn't appear this is the case.
Thanks for commenting so I could see this.
For what it's worth, penalizing submission rates is not the default in the plugin itself, that's just for the demo. And also, in my testing, HN at large has "high trust" practically everywhere. My own account is consistently one of the lowest scoring that I come across, ironically. So perhaps this plugin isn't as useful as I had hoped.
Hmmm. No data here, just heuristics from my time on HN, but if I were looking for bot accounts, I'd look for:
* a large percentage of posts from the same domain
* a large number of flagged posts
There are also some domains that show up when you are logged in and submit them and don't show up if you view the page anonymously (the entire domain has been added to the killfile). dev.to is one of these.
Submissions of those domains might be automated.
Good luck!