I have just coded something that gets rid of R-plyGuy and R-plyGal quite well.  I will make it available on unstable soon.  It is not the ultimate solution (is there any such thing?) but it works for these.

First I extended the filter.rhai script to have access to a variable 'name' which is the name of the user (from metadata).  In my script I reject based on the user's name being "R-plyGuy" or "R-plyGal"

(I'm not putting the actual name in case someone else's spam filter aggressively filters that from contents).

This doesn't help yet because when the event comes in, we don't have the metadata to lookup the name so the event passes the original spam filtering.

So I added some settings to apply the spam filtering to various situations like the thread feed.  The UI originally displays it briefly with a pubkey while it triggers the fetcher to go get the metadata.  Once the metadata flows in, the next time it recomputes the feed the spam filtering now sees the name and strips out the event.

So you might see these flash on the screen, but not for long.

I have some additional work, then I'll push to unstable.  Then I'll try to see if we can't get the master branch merged forward soon. 

 What if they start generating random names or no name at all? 

 Then this solution won't work.

But what I coded is still useful for many situations as we can now apply the spam script to the inbox, the thread feed, etc, and it now has the user name passed in.  That is a general improvement. 

 They have already transitioned now into having normal-looking names.

They still have "reply guy" in their "about", but I think using these solutions will just cause them to change again and make it harder for us humans to distinguish them and apply better methods (i.e. relay-based filtering). 

 Yes it isn't a complete solution but it is working for me. They are all gone in my inbox and thread feeds. 

 This is interesting but wouldn't the final solution be PoW? Relays requiring some small PoW, even clients requiring it for non follows?  Ofc it would need to be easy to toggle for when youre in the mood to discover. What do you think? 

 It isn't widespread. For now we can't do it. 

 Thank Q