How do you keep /away (AFK) status on all the time?

[Surian]

Yeah I thought the same and was doubting it, so she went back to hunt down the person and sent me a screenshot. Name is blurred out because screenshot was taken without permission and I'm posting it without permission.

That would be a bot right there.

The way AFK is coded right now, only keyboard or mouse strokes make you go un-AFK. Having a third-party program input commands for you does not remove AFK. So for a change our badly coding overlords are doing us a favor helping us track down bots.

[Bixby]

Does using a gamepad while the game client is in the background (with the option to allow that enabled) turn off AFK status?

Even if it does, you could very easily macro your way through easy enemies, regardless of your input method or whether the client is in the foreground or not, and the AFK flag would blip out for a split second at most:

/away on
/tenemy
/ac "Fire 1" <t> <wait.3>
/ac "Fire 1" <t> <wait.3>
/ac "Transpose" <me> <wait.1>
/ac "Blizzard 1" <t> <wait.3>
/ac "Blizzard 1" <t> <wait.3>
/echo Hit the button again, dude. <se.3>

Or whatever. I dunno THM well enough to make something practical. But the idea's the same.

Edit: Heck, for that matter, you could just make a set of hotbars where all your abilities are macro'd, and stick "/away on" as the first line in every one, and you'd be able to play normally and keep the AFK flag up as long as you didn't chat, or use the mouse, or open menus/windows you can't open with a macro, or move. (There are macros for lock on, autorun and jump, so those movements are doable. If you have automatically facing the enemy when you use a skill turned on, you could even lock on and turn on autorun, and you'd be able to do this as a melee, too, though you'd look even more obviously stupid and bottish.)