Place filtering power in the hands of the players!

[EmberRaine]

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!

[rina_inverse]

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

[Eye_Gore]

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

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

[Risvertasashi]

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

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.

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

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.

[Kyomagi]

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

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

[Zplinter]

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)

[Eye_Gore]

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.

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

[Risvertasashi]

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

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...

[Cikala]

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

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.

[Kosmos992k]

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.

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.