Increase the number of blacklists or...

...auto delete those who don't exist. It's getting ridiculous seeing hundreds of spams per day, so I try to blacklist. At least then I don't get repeated spam from the same username. Come on, SE, are you going to tell me that you can't create a text filter that blocks these people? When these shouts are showing up, people aren't asking for a million gil, and if they are, they aren't getting it. So first blast anything that refers to 1,000k or 1,000,000 or 1million... you get the idea. How about the people shouting a repeated message that contains suspicious text? Block their ability to shout, then investigate. Simple. At the very least, let me blacklist as many people as I need. If my username is asdfghjkl and I do nothing but shout numbers, I'm probably a spammer. Those people should be in limbo till they prove they are NOT spammers. A little guilty before proven innocent might go a long way.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by EricCartmenez

Come on, SE, are you going to tell me that you can't create a text filter that blocks these people?

---

They've already got text filters that block obvious gil-spam messages. That's why the spammers have to resort to using weird letters like a W made of two V's, or a vertical bar in place of an l, etc. Whenever SE adds new filters, the spammers just re-write their messages to avoid those filters. So, for instance, blocking a website name made using V's in place of W's just leads to writing the W's using alternating forward and backward slashes, or whatever. There's far too many possible alterations for a simple text filter to catch all the possible combinations of them, and the spammers will try until they find a version that the filters missed.

Similarly, if the system blocks spamming the same message repeatedly, the spammers just append a few meaningless random letters at the end that are different each time, so the software no longer recognizes it as being the same message over and over.

I really wish blocking spam were as easy as it seems like it would be. If that were the case, we wouldn't be beset with so much of it in the first place.

(I do however, think SE needs to do a better job of blocking these spammers once they're identified. We should have a "Report RMT" entry in the right-click menu that's as easy as the "Blacklist" option, and SE should be keeping up with it and banning these spammers as soon as those reports verify the RMT. That would be effective, but it would also require a GM continuously monitoring these reports.)