I think I witnessed a possible way they are tracking Gather bots.

So I was leveling an alt when I came out of a dungeon with full bags and needed to empty. I noticed a had quiet a few "satchel of useful goods" but I couldn't open them. So I logged out and came back in and tried again nothing. So I re-queued for dungeons (as tank) and noticed it had a 45min queue time and wasn't popping instantly anymore. So I decided to out on my hunter a do a some farming. All day today farming ore was pretty hard people were botting like crazy, the air traffic was significantly heavy as in it seemed no matter where I went near nods there was someone (mostly bots) near the nods(why I got on my alt). So I hit my first nod and I can't loot it, try it again still can't loot it, move to another same thing. So I kill a mob and I can't loot it, I send a message to a friend and ask if he can loot anything and he says he can't. So I start seeing bots collect on nods some must have ninja on. others move along, Than I start noticing them logging off and since then the traffic is all but gone and I'm able to find a lot more nods and 3 of the people I added to my friends list have not logged back in and its been about 20-30mins. Randomly after I see these folks log out about 2 mins later you could loot again, no server restart no server message. Food for thought though.

 

Nope, it was just server lag. Bots got logged off and people weren't there to log back in. That's all it was.

 

To be fair, I've had it bug and not be able to open bags or collect herbs on my main account that has never been botted. Seems just to be weird server lag.