I had a post a few month ago on signs of autoers. The worst "obvious" autoers are the one running acounts like this "Bob1" World 5, "Bob2" World 6...etc...I reported a guy running 11 accounts at once... on yews...all lvl 70 and above(solely in the woodcutting skill). Is that autoing? I can safely assume so. All 11 accounts were later banned. Okay beyond that you have to look for patterns...examples... clues are they were the basic runescape clothing, aka they account was made really fast. Second, they are lvl 3 or 4...this is often a give away, but not always see spaz or whatever his name that used to be on here (lvl 3 with like 1100 total lvls). Three, they have one skill (the one they are using) that trumps all the rest...aka they don't have a single other skill on the top 1,000,000 list. Fourth, massive extended time on a world. I've logged on to do a few yew runs in the morning see a few people...then I come back at six or seven that night and they are still there...fishy. Generally macroers share several of these characteristics...obviously a macroer will not talk, or if it does...it won't make sense (I've seen macros that answer things like "he" or
"I like that"). You can tell it is macroing because it repeats the same thing a million times.
A few other tips to spot a macro. Look for mathmatically precise movements over a period of time aka every time a tree gets cut down the character waits exactly x amount of seconds to move. Also, many macros only move between certain trees. I.E. the middle two in draynor forest. Why? To avoid the muggers at the east tree and passing through the jail guard cell when going back to the bank at the north tree. Other trick including trying a a rubber chicken which the macro sometimes sees as an attack and will run...(I haven't gotten this to work on a treecutting macroer.)
I hope I've helped you out. There are ways to intelligently identify macroers...if you are careful and thought full you can avoid reporting players that are just not talking...happy macroer hunting.
Bonas edit: A way to limit tree macroers would be to put lvl 10 or 20 monsters around draynor forest (and other yew spots) that attacked fairly often...like the scorpions in the mines...would it be fair? I think making people raise there combat to 30 or so to avoid being attacked is a fair trade off for limiting macroers. One of the problems with rune ess was there is nothing to attack low combat players down there...hence any lvl 3 can macro hardcore for days or weeks in the rune ess mines.
