Having used TTDDTOT as a honeypot to observe shill behaviours, I can add this:

Successful research gets flooded with esoteric crap, image spam and ravings that go nowhere, which looks like classic 'discredit by association' (essentially, they pose as complete crazies in a given thread but unlike everyone else, don't actually do any factual research or collaboration).

Key tells of the esoteric shill crap:

1) They don't reply to others with valid research, or only reply to other crapper esoteric bullshit (IE posts are 'standalone' or 'islands')

2) Randomly cherry picked numbers that are literally meaningless. Classic format: _ + _ = __

3) Distracting image of some sort, usually not relevant in any way to the post they made (automated posting?)

4) No research conducted, no links, no factual information provided, or any facts referred are "old hat" or extremely well known.

5) Placed next to valid research that includes links, content that cites articles, PDFs, news, original research

6) Heavily opinionated

7) Fails both rules of the shill 'sniff test': Is it useful? No. Would you be impeded if it disappeared? No.

Confident shills are employing the same tactics they did to try to discredit the 9/11 movement: intermingle a number of excessively vocal artificial crazies who don't fit the norm to make it seem like the overall group of supporters are crazy as a way to water down high quality research.

The only solutions are either moderation or 'off-siting' the research into a place where the data can be organised and filtered for garbage. And I'm acutely aware 8chan would be opposed to both methods.