The bots that spam aren't the same bots that farm. Even though its a bot doing the work, a level 20 or 50 or whatever level bot they get it to is still a valuable asset to the gil sellers. They don't risk losing their leveled bot just to spam their websites, all the spam is from level 1 characters. SE could approach this in two ways - 1: Allow players to set a /tell level threshold, be it level 2, level 5, or level 49. That should be up to the player. 2: If the spammers DO just level their bots up to defeat a threshold (Which I doubt they would, especially a player chosen threshold that could be anything between 2 and 49), SE would then have to attack the core of the problem; the fact that bots are farming and find a way to detect the activity.

On the other hand, I do like the "busy" status idea. I was not aware that busy status blocked tells. It is not quite an ideal solution since I would still like to get tells from people on my friends list who may not think to contact me through a LS. I'll have to play with busy status. When another player tries to send you a tell while in busy, do they get a system reply saying that I am busy and not accepting tells similar to how some duties give such replies? Or would it appear to the other player that I am simply ignoring their tell?