There's no plan to fix the ebots, AFAIK. The programmers have started working on the galleries.

But I do hope that they'll consider the ebot issue.

I know how I would address the issue: for every database update that COULD trigger an ebot to be sent out, I'd put a message in a message queue with the relevant information (forum ID, thread ID, post ID, gallery ID, whatever). Asynchronously.
And a second, low-priority process would handle the messages in the queue, figuring out what ebots to send to what users. I don't think anyone would mind a few seconds or even minutes delay in receiving e-bots, as long as the main forum/gallery site works smoothly and as long as the correct ebots get sent out.
By using message queueing it's easy to offload the ebot handling to a separate server..It's also easy to set up multiple application servers that all send their messages to the same message queue.
Message queueing is a proven technology for over 20 years. PHP can do it - handling credit card payments is also done by message queueing. But it does require thorough software design and doesn't lend itself to "quick & dirty". I guess the programmers know about message queueing, but just didn't have the time to design and implement it.

The pen is mightier than the sword. But if you literally want to have some impact, use a typewriter

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