A possible way to kill RMT sellers in chat..

The current system of just kicking the spamming character does nothing. A replacement comes online in minutes with the exact same message. SE needs to attack the message itself.

After a certain number of reports for posts with message content that's say, 80% the same or greater, start by flagging the site URL. Any further messages with the flagged text in it gets blocked to prevent anyone but the poster from seeing the message (so they keep posting blind.)
They'll have to keep changing their URL every time they get blocked.

If they find a way around that, flag 10 random characters in the message, and block of more than 8 of them appear, so they'll have to change the whole ad every time it gets silenced.

Also, like in WoW, if you report chat spam, you stop seeing it for the remainder of your login session, so you get some immediate benefit from reporting.

Sounds simple enough.

I'm sure the bots would evolve to double up on locations and look for each others messages before changing how they spam the url but it's better than doing nothing.

Waiting for someone smarter than me to explain if and how they could get around it even faster.

i'm sorry to burst your bubble but blacklisting specific phrases with a bot is hilariously easy to work around. Even now they include random symbols into the urls as form of cypher against automatic detection.

I dont know why everyone expects RMT sellers to be unable to adept to anything. Both cheating and RMT end up being a massive arms race when engaged with.

Other games have done that type of thing, where certain words become auto-blocked by chat filters server side. RMT bots always, and I mean always, end up getting updated so that those words are spelt using variations. For instance:

.com becomes .(om or . C O M or anything that makes it so that you still understand what they are saying.

It goes for basically any word that would be used. They ALWAYS find a way around it.

Why not add mobile phone verification for free trial accounts being able to chat at all? I know some might be against this, but a few days ago there was someone in Limsa spamming slurs and obscenities on a free trial account in /say. At least if it required a number it would very likely cut down on these spamming bots by a huge amount. It seems to work somewhat on social media platforms.

So now we're censoring chat?

No thanks bud. Just ignore them when you see them and put them on your black list.

If they censor an entire message I send to a friend/FC because I happened to type a sentence with those 8 letters I would be pissed.

Censoring what the playerbase is and isn't allowed to say in chat is not a solution.

tbf we already have a profanity filter in place that does something similar, but it too falls victim to the Scunthorpe Problem.

Really, just ignore them, because in trying to block RMT bots you'll end up blocking player messages as well. Even worse when RMT bots realize what the devs did and start working around it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Saimeren

So now we're censoring chat?

No thanks bud. Just ignore them when you see them and put them on your black list.

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In WoW, trade chat was so infested with spammers that I just shut it off completely. There wasn't anything worthwhile being said there any more.

The problem with blacklisting is that it works against the name, and the spambots change names so often that your list would be full in a month. Perhaps a by-user filter. I create a filter that blocks anything with "**gold." in it. and I never see another post that matches it. The spammers won't know players are blocking their crap until their business falls off. Unfortunately, individual filtering / blacklisting won't stop the spammers from reaching their intended victims.