Place filtering power in the hands of the players!

Dear SE,

Please give the players the ability to filter messages, shouts, etc. through the use of key words. I am tired of living my game life on /busy, as many players are. I also now have shouts turned off, thanks the the renewed city spam.

For example, I could place in my filter the words/phrases: gold, .com, delivery.
I could then choose the options: tells, shouts.
The filter would block any incoming tells and shouts containing those key words.

Simple. Efficient. I could change words as the RMT attempt to get more inventive. changing keywords would be much easier than trying to blacklist a million character names.

Please do this for us.
And if you, the player, supports this idea, please post in this thread.

Thanks!

well SE did implement some form of profanity filter, though its only blurred the word.
making it like that would be the simplest solution

creating a feature such as email spam filter would require more effort

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Originally Posted by EmberRaine

For example, I could place in my filter the words/phrases: gold, .com, delivery.

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Problem is: g0ld, .co m, de livery, just bypassed your filters.

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Originally Posted by rina_inverse

creating a feature such as email spam filter would require more effort

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It's actually pretty easy with the use of what's known as Regular Expressions. There's third party addons that do exactly this for RMT tells, but sadly we can't really talk much about those here. If SE would actually deliver on their promise of official addon support we could do this pretty easily.

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Originally Posted by Eye_Gore

Problem is: g0ld, .co m, de livery, just bypassed your filters.

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There are actually programming languages (perl and it's accompanying regular expressions mainly comes to mine) that allow for approximate matches (i.e. if it's just an extra space or changed letter it still matches), recognize that '0' can also be 'o' and other such common substitutions.

These aren't unsolved problems. Of course one has to be careful, lest they accidentally match legitimate messages. But with addon support we could decide for ourselves what filtering methods to use and how aggressive to make them.

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Originally Posted by Eye_Gore

Problem is: g0ld, .co m, de livery, just bypassed your filters.

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was just going to reply with this every thing. There are always bypasses to filters.

Or the could let us blacklist the account tied to the offending user name. This would block them from spamming, deleting that toon and making a new one that is not blacklisted. That bit of coding should be fairly easy (depending on how them set up the black list coding)

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

There are actually programming languages (perl and it's accompanying regular expressions mainly comes to mine) that allow for approximate matches (i.e. if it's just an extra space or changed letter it still matches), recognize that '0' can also be 'o' and other such common substitutions.

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SE already does this, as we can see how well it works. Thats why there are so many variations in the spam messages.

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Originally Posted by Eye_Gore

SE already does this, as we can see how well it works. Thats why there are so many variations in the spam messages.

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Perhaps. But if we had control over our own filters, we could fine tune it/change it faster than they adapt. There's proof in the fact that there's a third party RMT spam blocking addon for FFXIV that does this quite well, oh but it's third party so we could (in theory) get banned for it and we have to dance around the discussion. If SE would just actually deliver addon support...

Of course, it's not the root of the RMT problem, but it would be a big QoL improvement...

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Originally Posted by Eye_Gore

SE already does this, as we can see how well it works. Thats why there are so many variations in the spam messages.

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Maybe SE had some filters in place at one time, but considering I've seen messages lately that have a straight web address in them, such as www.whatever.com, with no attempt to mask the fact that it's a web address, well, I have come to believe that for whatever reason SE removed the filters at some point.

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Originally Posted by Cikala

Maybe SE had some filters in place at one time, but considering I've seen messages lately that have a straight web address in them, such as www.whatever.com, with no attempt to mask the fact that it's a web address, well, I have come to believe that for whatever reason SE removed the filters at some point.

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Nope, it's simply that the web address you saw was not in the filter. The filter does not filter out every URL, if it did, no player could refer a friend to their own site or anything like that. So if an RMT starts using a site that has yet to be blocked by the filter, it will get through until it's reported sufficiently to make it to the filter.

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Originally Posted by EmberRaine

For example, I could place in my filter the words/phrases: gold, .com, delivery.
I could then choose the options: tells, shouts.

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This is a fantastic idea. All for it!

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Originally Posted by Eye_Gore

Problem is: g0ld, .co m, de livery, just bypassed your filters.

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That's the beauty of the system... if something slips through, you can control it yourself and update it immediately.
No need to add things to your blacklist.
No need to wait for a patch or action from SE.

Even better... the Gil sellers have no idea what your personal filter settings are.

Right now, every Gil seller knows exactly what your filter settings are... because they're the same for everyone. They can test and verify and update their own systems immediately by checking against their own characters.
With this system... can't do that. Gil sellers would be "working in the dark."

Sounds to me like a great system to put in.
We all know that no other static system has ever stopped them. This is a dynamic system, controlled immediately by the user themselves.

Would it be perfect? Likely not. But come up with a perfect Gil-seller blocking system and Blizzard and SE will make you a rich man.
It does, however, contain many advantages to the user, and many disadvantages to the Gil seller.

All for it!!

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Originally Posted by Kosmos992k

Nope, it's simply that the web address you saw was not in the filter. The filter does not filter out every URL, if it did, no player could refer a friend to their own site or anything like that. So if an RMT starts using a site that has yet to be blocked by the filter, it will get through until it's reported sufficiently to make it to the filter.

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So are you trying to say the filter can't contain www.*.com? That's the first thing I would expect to be added to a filter. I'm pretty sure it was filtered when they were first put in place anyway.

I haven't seen a straight up RMT website in a long time. They always have character breaks or symbols, hearts or stars around them. We would spend more time fiddling with filters than actually playing the game. One simple thing I think would work that they could do, disable the player search function. Who really uses it besides RMT anyways? If anyone does, I'm sure it is not alot of people and wouldn't be missed, or give an option to be "unlisted" from that function.

I couldn't agree more with this. Coming from Zalera where I feel like the RMT behavior is extreme, there truly needs to be a solution and soon. Also, there needs to be better method of blocking friend requests than simply filling your friend list up to max. I don't want RMT sending me friend requests, but I don't want to have to talent scout for 169 prospective friends just to keep them from doing it. We need solutions, because the environment in this game is deteriorating tremendously.

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Originally Posted by Eye_Gore

I haven't seen a straight up RMT website in a long time. They always have character breaks or symbols, hearts or stars around them. We would spend more time fiddling with filters than actually playing the game. One simple thing I think would work that they could do, disable the player search function. Who really uses it besides RMT anyways? If anyone does, I'm sure it is not alot of people and wouldn't be missed, or give an option to be "unlisted" from that function.

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I use the 3rd party program that has the chat filter and I only had to set it up once and I no longer see any rmt. So no if SE added this to the game we wouldnt spend more time setting up filters than playing.

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Originally Posted by Lii

I use the 3rd party program that has the chat filter and I only had to set it up once and I no longer see any rmt. So no if SE added this to the game we wouldnt spend more time setting up filters than playing.

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Then why is SE not doing the same? I don't mean giving us one but on their end. So that no one would need to use one.

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Originally Posted by Eye_Gore

Then why is SE not doing the same? I don't mean giving us one but on their end. So that no one would need to use one.

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No idea, I got tired of waiting on SE to add a filter so I started to use the program.

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Originally Posted by Lii

No idea, I got tired of waiting on SE to add a filter so I started to use the program.

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I know why, but no one is going to want to hear it and I would probably be called crazy.

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Originally Posted by Cold_Raven

That's the beauty of the system... if something slips through, you can control it yourself and update it immediately.
No need to add things to your blacklist.
No need to wait for a patch or action from SE.

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But there IS a need to update your program every time they figure out a combination to break through. And they will.
This is why it's gold *spam*. If there's a way to break through these systems, even if logic would dictate they're not going to get your business even if they gave free chocolate every time they advertise, they would find a way.

You can come up with fancy shmancy ways to block RMT tells all you want, consume dozens upon dozens of man hours to implement code that might not even work (meaning even after all that work, your customers still complain and the problem is still there) but in the end the core problem is still there.


What we really need is a zero tolerance policy on gold buyers. The sellers will just hijack new accounts or use stolen credit cards so long as they have a market. Nix the buyers, and they have no reason to be here.
Moreover we need better education about why exactly you should never even go to these websites, to avoid more compromised accounts.

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Originally Posted by SanjuroXI

They need to copy paste the filters from FFXI those worked fine once they put them in.

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XI uses a very different chat system from XIV, so it's waaaaay more complicated than a simple copy-paste job.

They need to copy paste the filters from FFXI those worked fine once they put them in.

As I said, the RMT would continually change up their spam to try to bypass personal filters. .com would become .(om , etc etc.
BUT I would rather have the ability to filter the spam, or at least try. We can't blacklist the RMT- just too many of them, rotating accounts. A message filter would at least give me a fighting chance.

Also, players would use their filters differently. For instance, I may block the words .com, .COM, and delivery. Joe might block .c o m, hordebank, and delivery. And so on. What Joe filters doesn't affect my chatbox personally, but overall, there will be a collective reduction in spam getting through to players. That should be enough to piss them off, and they deserve to get screwed. Yes, they will try to find other ways to spam us, and then we'll just come up with another way to block them.

So for now, we should have a chat filter that the players can use.

I'd like to see this feature added, not only for RMT, but also as an expansion/replacement of the existing profanity filter.

The problem with the profanity filter is that what one person thinks is "profanity" is not necessarily what everyone thinks is "profanity". >.> Personally, I have learned "bad" words from the profanity filter. (What can I say? I don't get out much. :P)

And then there's the mismatches. (Remember when "basement" used to trip the profanity filter?)

If we had a player-defined filter list, each person could filter out the stuff they don't want to see to fit their own definition of "profane". :)