Enough is enough, give us proper tools to deal with spammers

Two things are needed like... yesterday.

1) A right-click option to report a player for spamming. It takes too much work to report someone now, and most people don't bother. I would love an auto-silence (stop whispers from a player) after some high threshold of unique reports against a player (50? Something that would be difficult for a group of people to manipulate to hurt real players, but easy enough for a gil spammer to get if we had a quick way to send reports).

2) Allow friends and FC members to by-pass the tell filter put in place by /busy. I'd use busy, if I wasn't worried that my friends or FC members might try to send a tell and not be able to get through.

I know battling spammers is a long road, but I think it's ridiculous that our current options are to go through a complicated report process or to ignore all tells to avoid the nuisance. They have gotten alot worse lately, and I just want to play without being harassed every day.

I'd also like it if when you removed someone from your friend list, it removes you from theirs. Accidentally accepting an RMTs friend request is the worst.

Would be nice if the many and more requests for these and other such would not still be going ignored...

I 100% support this thread; take all my likes.

Additionally we need a way to clean out the blacklist. Going 1 by one through 200 names is time consuming and tedious. We need a "Bulk Delete" feature.

I wholly agree on what's being said in this topic, and I'd say that out of the suggestions, creating an auto-silence function isn't really a great thing, since it can be abused quite easily by one player inputting 50 unique reports.

Think the unique in this case meant, coming from x unique characters/accounts. Yes, a big linkshell or fc could still abuse it, but even that would leave quite a trace, what with all reports coming from members of same fc/linkshell. While it could inconvenience someone for a while appeal would later be clear case.

However if say, about hundred or more people who have nothing that connects them report same character/account in short while hitting them with immediate chat-ban would save rest from lot of grief.

The auto-silence after let's say 50 reports is good actually, but it has to be applied to the account. When I report in Excalibur, it takes max 5 minutes for the reported charachter (rmt) to be taken out. And I have the impression it's just me reporting since after the second repeat I get the GM answer and the guy is gone. But as said before, you can report characters all day if you have no better to do, they just make another and rinse/repeat. But you can't expect players to sit there and report all day.
We are here to play, not to watch out for rmts, I would suppose that's SE's job. Or give me a minion every 50 rmts and I gladly stop playing and will hunt them down. I play on ps4 and have to activate my wireless keyboard to copy/paste cause the ingame mouse doesn/t have a right click-copy/paste. Also it takes ages for the contact-us/fill-report window to load and then we have to give the details when it should be in the log anyways. So yes, we need a better report system, and it's about time now after more than 2 years since ARR launch to apply bans to accounts straight away rather than the character. SE, you get a copy of the spam log, what kind of investigation or proof do you still need?

To go along with the right-click report feature, SE needs to have someone watching and responding to those reports in real time. It won't work if they gather up a week's worth of reports, or even a day's worth, and then go through them. The spam would disappear if they combined three things:

(1) A rule that once you send a /tell, you cannot send another for a few seconds. Even a 3 or 4 second delay, too short to interfere with a legitimate /tell conversation, would be enough to ensure spammers aren't whispering more than 15 or 20 players per minute. Or, if they made it specific to restricting when they could next send a /tell to a different player, perhaps they could expand it to 5 or 6 seconds apart, so a spammer couldn't send their ads to more than 10 or 12 players per minute.

(2) Add the right-click "report RMT spam" feature to the chat log that we've been asking for for years now. (I'd also like to see "report harassment" both on the chat log and when interacting in person with another character, and a "report suspected bot" on character interaction, but the "report RMT spam" in the chat log is the one relevant to this topic, and the one that's most desperately needed based on frequency of the problem.) It should automatically include all relevant details (who sent the report, who was reported, and the text of the chat message reported) into the report, which should immediately pop up on the screen of whichever GM is assigned to handle these.

which brings us to:
(3) They need to have somebody on duty to handle these reports in real time as they come in. The reporting system then needs to be streamlined on the GM's end as well as on the players', so that the GM only has to glance at the report, see whether the message is indeed spam or not, and click on a button that says either "Yes, ToS violation RMT spam" (which immediately kicks out the offending spam bot and bans their account) or "No, unjustified report" (which just logs the fact that the reporting player sent a false report, so that later data mining can determine if anyone is abusing the system by repeatedly sending lots of false reports).

With this combination, spam bots could, for the most part, be banned within a minute or two (often within seconds) of sending their first /tell /say or /shout. Sure, occasionally some might last an extra 15 minutes or so if they start when the GM goes on his coffee break (assuming they'd only get someone to cover their position when they go on a longer lunch break). But thanks to (1) above even those spam bots lucky enough to get a few extra minutes would still only reach a tiny portion of the playerbase, and most would be gone after just their first few messages.

Not only would this get rid of the immediate spam bots, but the RMT companies would quickly find that this method of advertising is no longer cost effective. Spam bots that get banned after just a few messages are unlikely to find new buyers with those few messages, so will rarely bring in any income to justify the cost of setting them up. The current long-after-the-fact banning doesn't really accomplish anything because so long as the spam bots are bringing in money, then the RMT companies just keep replacing any bot that gets banned. But they won't keep replacing ones that are no longer effective. Soon after this immediate simple reporting and immediate simple banning goes into effect, the big RMT companies that have been plaguing the game will take their advertising elsewhere. Occasionally a newcomer to the market might try it out, and spread a few spam messages, but they wouldn't last long.

This in turn means that the job described in (3) of needing a GM to handle all these reports, is only a significant (likely full-time) responsibility for maybe the first week or so, only while clearing out all the spam bot accounts already in the game or the first few new ones created, before the RMT companies realize it doesn't work any more. After that, the number of spam bots, and therefore the number of reports, would drop off to an occasional trickle, and the GM handling them could spend the majority of his/her time on other responsibilities. (Of course, when a report does come in, they'd still need to have someone available to handle it immediately. As mentioned, newcomers to the market will try out spam from time to time, and it's important that whenever they do, they find it unproductive.)

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

This in turn means that the job described in (3) of needing a GM to handle all these reports, is only a significant (likely full-time) responsibility for maybe the first week or so, only while clearing out all the spam bot accounts already in the game or the first few new ones created, before the RMT companies realize it doesn't work any more. After that, the number of spam bots, and therefore the number of reports, would drop off to an occasional trickle, and the GM handling them could spend the majority of his/her time on other responsibilities. (Of course, when a report does come in, they'd still need to have someone available to handle it immediately. As mentioned, newcomers to the market will try out spam from time to time, and it's important that whenever they do, they find it unproductive.)

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SE could hire an intern still in school for this job.

Pay them peanuts and I'm sure they wouldn't care. It's EXP in the business. Just on these forums I see people volunteering to read these reports for free (waived sub fee). Of course the players are biased and that could be an issue. If they get players to do it, have a suitable punishment for banning people they don't like, like banning their account for life or something.

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Originally Posted by Lucke

SE could hire an intern still in school for this job.
Pay them peanuts and I'm sure they wouldn't care. It's EXP in the business. Just on these forums I see people volunteering to read these reports for free (waived sub fee).

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Yeah, just going through one spam report after another after another identifying whether they're legit or not would be the sort of incredibly simple and incredibly boring work that's generally foisted off onto interns or other low paid temp workers. That's likely what they'd use to cover the initial surge of reporting. Once that initial surge is over and spam bots and the ensuing spam reports become a rare occurrence, then that responsibility could be passed on to the regular GM team, who should only have to deal with it occasionally after that point.

Agreed, out with the gil spammers.

They are flies, we need flyswatters, not needles.

The trick to letting players review RMT spam is not letting them review reports from their own data center. Then, they can never be reviewing a report about anyone they know. And if they can only ban players through the report that they get from another player from another data center (no direct bans), then it's even harder to abuse.

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

<lots of things>

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I completely support this solution; however, there is one aspect that needs work. SE uses these gil-spammers as the initial point to investigate gil farming enterprises. Without this front end, how do they find the farming networks?

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Originally Posted by Amalise

SE uses these gil-spammers as the initial point to investigate gil farming enterprises. Without this front end, how do they find the farming networks?

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Well, they do track the gil of RMT gathering/farming bots to find where it reaches the hands of RMT buyers (which is part of why bot reports appear to go unaddressed for so long), but the spam bots are on separate accounts (deliberately kept separate because they're so much easier to identify and the RMT companies don't want their gil sources compromised).

About the only thing SE can learn from a spam bot is the website address of where gil buyers can go to purchase from them. But the RMT companies are going to be advertising that somewhere, whether it's in-game or not. If they hide effectively enough that SE can't find even their website address, then not many players are going to find it either, and not much RMT will be going on through that site. Advertising is the sort of thing that can't be both hidden and effective at the same time very well.

Everyone should "Like" the post from MaeIsMean to vote it up!

I have to disagree with the suggested time limits for chat habits. At least such time limits should be lifted when chatting with a person either in the friendlist or FC. I culd agree them being reasonable when sending tells to people I don't talk with regularly.

The need to IP ban the addresses of repeated bot use. There's only 3-4 RMT sites I see advertised. Banning accounts will never solve the problem because of free trials and the ability of RMTs to buy another game or get a free trial.

This right here is why simply telling players to put the spammer on their blacklist does not work.

http://i.imgur.com/d2LcBcK.png

In the span of 12 minutes, I received the same spam message from 3 separate individuals. Blacklisting the first would have done NOTHING to prevent me getting the second two messages. Please, SE, do SOMETHING about this. Even if you don't ban the accounts quickly, at least give us the means to report them quickly, or if that is just not in the cards, allow friends and FC to bypass /busy so I can just turn that on and ignore them ALL!

it's much simpler than that, remove the Player Search function, that's it, i haven't found any player using it but my guess is RMTs use it to /w everyone as everyone logged in appears there, --> Player Search is a RMT TOOL <-- why does it even exist? and if you DONT want to remove it, allow us make ourselves unsearchable

SE does work to implement server-side filters to detect keywords from known RMT tells and automatically block them but the turnaround time on this process seems to be quite lengthy.

I would really like to see a feature extended to clients where I can enter my own filter keywords. For instance if I could filter the keyword "U'sd" which I see in the above poster's image it would block all of those tells from my client. My chat log has actually had that same RMT tell it for the past week now so such a feature would have given me a whole week of quiet :P

I know that the RMT change their tell format every so often but it is must easier to block a unique string from their new format once a week then it is to right click --> blacklist 5+ times/hr.

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Originally Posted by HarleySykes

i... remove the Player Search function, that's it, i haven't found any player using it...

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That's a very drastic thing to do. I use it all the time to locate friends when they first subscribe to the game, or to locate players whose /tells I missed for one reason or another if they've gone into a duty.

If we're to say that the Player Search function is the issue, then I would say that it shouldn't allow you to enter in a "blank" entry. I've received a number of FC invites from people nowhere near me, and I realized that they were just going to the search bar and hitting enter, allowing them to see a list of everyone online at the time. I'm not sure if RMT bots even use game functions to send out /tells, but that's certainly one way to do it.

But I digress; I don't want the function removed. Instead, give us an easier way to report bots. I used to report them all the time, but lately it's been so bad that I couldn't possibly stop to do it.

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Originally Posted by Xenora

SE does work to implement server-side filters to detect keywords from known RMT tells and automatically block them but the turnaround time on this process seems to be quite lengthy.

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Well, I do recall seeing a dev post from quite a while ago claiming they did, but if so, their turnaround time is measured in years, which is effectively the same as not doing it at all. My guess is that they have the software to allow them to block known RMT strings in messages but have never actually used it. Either that, or they set it up once when the game was released and have never updated it since.

I do know for a fact that a great deal of the RMT messages I'm still seeing have the exact same text that has been being used for over a year now. Some of the RMT companies change their messages every so often, but others don't, so clearly it's not actually necessary in order for the messages to get through. (For instance, why isn't "♥BANK" blocked by now? They've been using that same heart to represent the first three characters of their web address for ages now. Their web address may not be written in its standard form, but it's written the exact same way they've been using ever since they started spamming this game with it.) So, for all practical purposes, no SE doesn't have server side text filters in use.

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Originally Posted by Xenora

I would really like to see a feature extended to clients where I can enter my own filter keywords. For instance if I could filter the keyword "U'sd" which I see in the above poster's image it would block all of those tells from my client. My chat log has actually had that same RMT tell it for the past week now so such a feature would have given me a whole week of quiet :P

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That would help a lot. Client side filtering places the hassle of updating those filters on the users, but does at least have the advantage that it's a lot harder for the RMT companies to modify their messages to evade the filters, because they can't ever be sure what filters you're using.

(Unfortunately, this means the more proficient players who update their filters aren't bothered by spam and think it goes away, while new players trying the game out who are still on default settings are still getting the full brunt of it. Leaves a rather bad impression on those new players that way.)

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Originally Posted by Amiaze

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Originally Posted by HarleySykes

... remove the Player Search function, that's it, i haven't found any player using it ...

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That's a very drastic thing to do. I use it all the time to locate friends when they first subscribe to the game, or to locate players whose /tells I missed for one reason or another if they've gone into a duty.

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Removing it completely would be too drastic, but an /anonymous flag that lets us opt out of being found through it could be a worthwhile improvement.

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Originally Posted by Niwashi

Removing it completely would be too drastic, but an /anonymous flag that lets us opt out of being found through it could be a worthwhile improvement.

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oh my gosh, yes yes yes yes yes to this! I have gotten in the habit of using /busy, but it always bugs me that I can't get tells or party invites with it on. Also, I've been using the same name in games since 1999, so I do get random tells sometimes from someone who remembers me from whatever game in the past. I'd love to be able to NOT use busy, but have a way to hide myself from whatever searches the bots use to pull names of players. I would think you'd have to also have anon apply to the lodestone as well, as you can never underestimate the ingenuity of spam bots, and perhaps they are spamming using feeds from there.

/bump

The RMT are completely out of control in this game. We're paying enough in subs per player to expect that there should be a staff available to quickly usher reported RMT out the door, as well as a system to quickly and easily report RMT while simultaneously making the RMT invisible to the person who reported them. This is basic. This game has been out for years. I don't understand the holdup...

For the PC, people download and use the Guildworks plugin, which includes a way to block tells if they match specific regular expressions. But there is no way to use to do this on the PS4 and PS3 versions.

Unless they truly are incompetent, SE must know about this issue. But it's obviously easier for them to ignore then actually address. They simply don't care enough to face the problem and resolve it. They know if you ignore the problem long enough, the problem goes away on it's own. By that I mean people just stop complaining and accept it.