[DEV SOLUTION] RMT /tell Spam

[Xayoc]

It has been observed a marked increase of RMT spam over the past few weeks. Understanding that there is a huge workload in tracing and banning every single one of these accounts that are spamming and given that many of these accounts are hacked and used for spam, wanted to give a solution that has worked very well for over 5 years now.

Back in the summer of 2007, there was a user by the name of 'Grawp' on the English Wikipedia who began moving pages to variations of 'HAGGER???', 'HERMY????' or personal attacks against the Wikipedia editors. After months of banning several IP blocks ranging from the Continental US to Zimbabwe, Wikipedia implemented a feature called the "Abuse Filter". What this does is disallows or flags certain edits that users may perform and brings them to the immediate attention of the admins, in this case in an IRC channel monitored by volunteer admins around the clock.

Why this is being brought up is that after leaving myself online overnight, while going to work, etc I have found that over 98% of RMT tells use 'pvpbank' and various ASCII iterations of the string to get around what Square-Enix has implemented so far to prevent RMT spam. Being that RMT can gather accounts as fast as Square-Enix seems to find them, I suggest to the developers implement an 'AbuseFilter' type of system for this game.

This would have several benefits:
1. RMT would not be able to effectively advertise, GMs would have active access to the abuse filters and could add a string of characters reported by a user immediately.
2. It would immediately flag advertising RMT accounts that attempt to bypass the filter with similar strings, removing the need for users to go through the cumbersome process of manually reporting it.
3. It would significantly decrease the presence of RMT in the game as any coded strings would flag for immediate GM intervention.

In summary, while this idea may seem Orwellian, it has operated for nearly five years now on Wikipedia with minimal issues and with great approval from the community and seems to be an effective solution for a very interminable problem.

[misterdapi]

This makes too much sense. +1 Vote

[Mayin]

What if im sending a tell and I accidentally trigger a flag without knowing it? Not nit picking, a legitimate question!

/tell SoAndSo Hey man, I keep getting these RMT tells. I don't want to buy gil for $10 and get a free xmas seasonal gift! What is this christmas gift anyway, and for crying out loud its February? LOL

Am I flagged? : S

[Arrak]

There are a ton of blocked phrases and whenever SE blocks or flags something, they change how they send the tells. The best way to do it is what WoW does. Every message sent in game has a report feature by right clicking their name in chat. When you report a person it puts them on a temporary black list for yourself. If enough people click report for that person, that person is locked out of posting publically and sending tells to people not on their friends list or guild. That user can also be flagged without someone having to fill out a GM report. SE is trying too hard to combat against RMT messages when they should allow the community to help them. The report feature can also be used against spammers and annoying people in /shout.

[Crimson-Falcon]

flagged =/ 100% ban

flagged = you have triggered the filter and your msg will be noted and GMs will investigate your msgs to guarantee that you are not RMT spammer and remove flag on you

[Zaels]

One of the ideas I thought up was to make it so you have to reach level 10 (or some other arbitrary number SE decides on) to send a tell to someone that isn't on your Friend list, FC, or Linkshells. However, you may respond to tells (as in send one back to someone that sent you one initially) regardless of level.

[Xayoc]

What if im sending a tell and I accidentally trigger a flag without knowing it? Not nit picking, a legitimate question!

/tell SoAndSo Hey man, I keep getting these RMT tells. I don't want to buy gil for $10 and get a free xmas seasonal gift! What is this christmas gift anyway, and for crying out loud its February? LOL

Am I flagged? : S

Being flagged doesn't mean you get any negative action against you, it merely send the /tell to a running stream to the Anti-RMT taskforce. Pretty sure you wont be saying 'pvpbank' or other similar terms used by the RMT in the past accidentally. However, the purpose of the filter is to deny the /tell in the first place, not merely to report it.

There are a ton of blocked phrases and whenever SE blocks or flags something, they change how they send the tells. The best way to do it is what WoW does. Every message sent in game has a report feature by right clicking their name in chat. When you report a person it puts them on a temporary black list for yourself. If enough people click report for that person, that person is locked out of posting publically and sending tells to people not on their friends list or guild. That user can also be flagged without someone having to fill out a GM report. SE is trying too hard to combat against RMT messages when they should allow the community to help them. The report feature can also be used against spammers and annoying people in /shout.

This system incorporates that sort of idea into it without the obvious potential for abuse. All AbuseFilter additions are done by the Anti-RMT Taskforce, but the actual contents of the additions are crowd-sourced.

[Kincard]

I have a hard time understanding why I have a much more irritating experience with RMT in this game compared to other games. True that RMT will be a permanent fixture with MMOs but this is the only game where I manage to have 3 or 4 separate people spamming tells at me every minute, and when I filter them they'll just be back with another account/character 2 minutes later. I already stopped bothering to blacklist them because not only is it completely ineffective, removing names from the blacklist is so incredibly annoying to do.

Either SE doesn't have enough GMs monitoring this, or their word filter is rubbish.

[Wadoka]

This place is strange. Given, I've only played 3 of the more-modern MMO and that's including just 3 or 4 hours of WoW - but I can't remember getting *any* RMT chat spam or tells/whispers playing SWTOR. May just be my faulty memory but I only remember obnoxious players who used gen chat instead of trade chat to auction items, and obnoxious players who spammed gen chat with Guild recruitment.

Makes me wonder what the Bioware bunch knows, that the SE folks don't? Or do RMT types just not take SWTOR seriously any more?

[Azell]

Simple solution: to send /tell to anyone NOT in your FC/LS/FL you need to be in a grand company.
So, need to be at least lvl 20 and do a lot of quests.
RTMs will only spam using stolen accounts, which will probablly be under investigation already.