If I were to SPAM these forums...

[MStowastiqVahlshdeh]

Though it may not seem like a lot to us because we still get spammed constantly, they do remove about 4k-5k or so RMT two to three times a month.

They release reports on the Lodestone each time with details of the ban count:
http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/news/category/1 under the heading: Actions Taken Against In-Game RMT & Other Illicit Activities (Date here).

There was actually four reports posted in Feb with a rough total of around 17409 RMT permanently banned!

Considering how much tells we still get after that amount of clean up, it hurts my brain to comprehend just how many there are in general.

I keep thinking there could be something that SE can put in the tell process, some kind of step or action that discourages automation of bots, but I don't have programming knowledge to fathom what such a thing could be.

[Culfinrandir]

There's a really, really, REALLY easy solution - immediate suspension of any account that receives a set amount of blacklists. That suspension can be reviewed at leisure to ensure it is for a valid reason. If the blacklisting was malicious the offending users would get a warning/suspension/ban as appropriate. I believe that in 99.99% of cases the suspension would be valid & made permanent. I'm not talking suspension after 7 people of a Full Party blacklist, I'm talking about 50 users or so blacklisting someone in an hour or whatever.

[Teryaani]

There's a really, really, REALLY easy solution - immediate suspension of any account that receives a set amount of blacklists. That suspension can be reviewed at leisure to ensure it is for a valid reason. If the blacklisting was malicious the offending users would get a warning/suspension/ban as appropriate. I believe that in 99.99% of cases the suspension would be valid & made permanent. I'm not talking suspension after 7 people of a Full Party blacklist, I'm talking about 50 users or so blacklisting someone in an hour or whatever.

I think SE would still avoid a solution like this because it could net people who either got on the wrong side of a large guild or were just obnoxious (which isn't necessarily against ToS). The thing is that it would have to be specific to RMT because people use their blacklist for more than just gil sellers. That's the problem with this. A blacklist doesn't mean the person did something wrong. It just means you don't want to hear from them.

[marewa]

I've noticed that names i have added to my BL, months and months ago, start re-spamming me once i have cleared my BL. I thought they'd all be gone. So so tired of it.

[MilesSaintboroguh]

nerf

Except the botters and RMT can easily squeezes out more characters and accounts faster than you can ban them and they work hard to get around every protection and filter that square churns out. Back in early 2.0, there would be a gang of bots in the North Shroud that would farm the LV45 mobs non stop and some players tried to break their script by either sending trade requests or luring other mobs to them. The botters grew wise and had set their status to busy (prevent trade offers) and changed their botted characters from THM to CNJ so that they can heal themselves.

Square and the botters/RMT are just playing cat and mouse with each other.

[Tidbits]

I've noticed that names i have added to my BL, months and months ago, start re-spamming me once i have cleared my BL. I thought they'd all be gone. So so tired of it.

Lol yeah that's the best, had GM say just take the folks off top of black list and add new ppl, old ones 'taken care of', but alas, get respammed minutes later by month old bots.

[GordonLiu]

I can accept the fact that there may be no silver bullet for the RMT SPAM (even if I think that some sort of measure to lock accounts for review when they hit a certain, high number of spam reports in a short span of time seems like it should be effective). I can't accept that they could not have significantly streamlined the process of reporting such activity by this point.

Judging by the threads on here, it seems that there are a lot of community members who, like myself, are diligently reporting RMT to do our part to help, but for whom SE doesn't seem to be doing a whole lot for in terms of making that process as quick and easy as possible. It almost seems to go in the opposite direction, really, by making us copy/paste, navigate more menus than necessary, and then wait for a notification that will periodically blink across the center of your screen if you don't address it quickly enough by opening the support menu again so that you can, again, go through more menus than necessary just to let them know that you have received your reply.

As Isaac said earlier in the thread, it almost makes one conspiratorial to notice how streamlined all of these elements of the user interface are, and how clunky the system for reporting RMT is. I certainly report RMT far, far more than I resize my chat log text, but I could resize my chat log text 4 times over before going through the process of reporting RMT once. It's beyond frustrating.

[TheUltimateSeph]

Restrict tells to people on your friends list only. And to prevent friend request spam from RMTs block the ability to send friend requests for 3 hours after 2-3 declined friend requests to the same person.

[GordonLiu]

I think SE would still avoid a solution like this because it could net people who either got on the wrong side of a large guild or were just obnoxious (which isn't necessarily against ToS). The thing is that it would have to be specific to RMT because people use their blacklist for more than just gil sellers. That's the problem with this. A blacklist doesn't mean the person did something wrong. It just means you don't want to hear from them.

Pardon the double-post.

A blacklist by, say, 30 people in 10 minutes probably means you did something wrong. And anyway, it's not a guillotine, it would just lock the account for review, and could easily be undone. If it turns out, after review, that the mass reporting was just users working in concert to be jerks to one player, then they themselves could face the banning that RMT would get after a conclusive investigation.

By the way, such investigations would be greatly facilitated by the automatic report/blacklist button that has been suggested by countless users. It would be hard to abuse an RMT report button that copypastes text automatically. Frankly, I don't think most people who just want to be mean to another player would even bother using such a system for such an inevitably failed endeavor.

To that point, is there any evidence of people using the existing system to do that to people? All I'm talking about is making something that already exists easier to do. If there is no known concern about people abusing the reporting system that way now, I don't think there is any reason to believe that making it easier to use would open the floodgates. If there is evidence of such activity, my next question would be: is there evidence that that is going on more than RMT SPAM is? Because there is an awful lot of evidence of the latter going on. If they're both abuses of SE's rules, then why not implement the framework that addresses the one that is taking place on a far larger scale? It seems like it would make everyone's life easier.

[Zomkei]

(obligatory thisthreadagain.jpg).

As a mostly forum lurker I've seen this time and time again, and here's what I don't get. When someone complains about a logical issue, which has had previous threads of, and died off, makes a new thread they get a comment like this. If there was a thread of the same topic on the first two pages I would understand, however, if not, what do you expect them to do? They can necro the thread, and get tons of people crying about them necroing the thread ("This thread is *** old why did you necro it?" / "That's some necroing there.") or they can just sit by and do nothing. If the issue isn't resolved, then I see no problem with them making, yes, yet ANOTHER thread of that very topic.

Which they are doing poorly about. Once I got reported in an instance due to my raise macro. It was a joke, written like an RMT tell, and yet someone seriously thought I was selling my raises for x amount of money. It took them 5 minutes to respond, pull me away, and send me to goal. The reason I know it was within 5 minutes is because the GM forgot to filter out the name of the person I had raised. I was then accused of selling in game "clears" (i.e; my raises mid battle lol) for real life money, and I had no way of fighting it no matter how much I tried to explain it to them.

Yet when I was sitting in Limsa, there was a particular bot (this was a couple days later) that I decided to report. It was a spamming bot sitting in a corner, jumping at time intervals, with that RMT type name. I had reported this bot and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. It was there for days after, still spamming, and this was on the weekday. So I agree with OP, I feel like not enough is being done. Thankfully I transferred to balmung and now I'm free of RMT spams and tells, but when I was on Hyperion, I lived in /busy.