Thanks for replying! I always enjoy our little chats.
I think you might be right... it's tough... it's just the two guys and they've been bubbling along nicely for a while now, and then pretty much jumped 200k SP overnight... and they've been busy developing and bug-fixing. Manual curation requires a whole infrastructure in place, and with over a hundred entries daily, it's a big task but I think ultimately you're right... there's two many variables to account for otherwise.
I don't think MB and SS are crazy hard to figure out... (until people start masking their wallet entries or submitting from other/other accounts).
Yup. Utopian had the scripts to try to tackle bots, then they went to scoring by mods/contributors who each have a weight/rank dependant on 'skill' level. I think they are fairly happy with this approach.