Perhaps I should throw in my few cents as well.
1) Don't ban econ bots made with good spirit.
Some bots, like my TeeBot, mostly just parse econ console to keep stats, logs and print out announcements or chat messages based on that. Its meant give users some comic relief and fun and doesn't change any game mechanics.(Ever tried saying "!rick" on ChickenServer 2, 4 or 5?)
TeeBot allows writing plugins to it and I can't quarantee plugins made by others are all in the same spirit I've done the project, but TeeBot opens up possibilities ranging from Admin panels to control several servers to status pages listing different game statistics far more accurately then what you can get from masterservers all without a single line of modified code in Teeworlds, working from remote locations and on any vanilla server with econ enabled.
2) Instead of banning econ bots, Do some of following:
1) Allow disabling chat&announcements from clientside
2) If you must, make rules only for econ bots that modify gameplay and wont list themselves as MOD gametype, using MOD would also allow them server tuning.*
3) Throw in some masterserver selection menu, make 1-3 masterservers with different rules, totally vanilla with no econ/rcon at all in 1(I mean, players can vote right?), allow econ bots in 2, and mods in 3rd, or similar setup, make it easy to add own masterservers(Masterserver for masterservers? ).
* It is possible to make up new "gamemodes" with econ bot. Basically you can check for kill, move to spectator, reduce player count, and thus creating survival gameplay. You could disable teambalance, check for kill, move to killers side, and make conquer or capture gametype. List goes on. At the same time, these could be done by admin manually using few keybindings and with group of people who might play agreeing on the "rules" and new comer thinks its modded server.
Another question, what about Rcon bots? One could modify client to do exactly what econ bots do using rcon while they play, or even simply list killing sprees in chat, If I were to make one such bot, then leave my self afk on my own server, should the server be banned from masterserver if someone reports it? How long this has to happen? What if I go on some one elses server while they are gone and report myself in the server, will they get banned from master server? How can you know if the afker client is their own or someone elses?
BBCodes I'd like to see: [youtube]