Everyone complaining about no action on RMT, please read

[Riepah]

People who think SE is doing all they can:

[Felghanna]

People who think SE is doing all they can:

This had to be done.

[DreadRabbit]

If they could just add a filter that stops any /tell with a list of the most common offending website ads that would stop a lot. I don't know about other servers, but on Zalera it seems to be three main websites that are constantly at it.

I need to take screenshots as those names probably aren't accurate, but just about every /tell I get is from the same circle of 3-4 gil selling sites. And the pvp one puts spaces between the letters to make it harder to track. It can't be that hard to code that sort of detecting filter, could it? (honest question).

Edited: got rid of the website names as that probably is against ToS somehow. My bad.

[Zabuza]

If they could just add a filter that stops any /tell with a list of the most common offending website ads that would stop a lot. I don't know about other servers, but on Zalera it seems to be three main websites that are constantly at it.

I need to take screenshots as those names probably aren't accurate, but just about every /tell I get is from the same circle of 3-4 gil selling sites. And the pvp one puts spaces between the letters to make it harder to track. It can't be that hard to code that sort of detecting filter, could it? (honest question).

Edited: got rid of the website names as that probably is against ToS somehow. My bad.

http://i.imgur.com/qkNTxWQ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/PuCI6oz.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/rb45o8h.jpg

P.S. Note the timestamps.

[Kayden1010]

So it's a cycle isn't it, where no matter how hard Square Enix tries more bots and hackers are just gonna keep appearing? That's depressing

[Zabuza]

So it's a cycle isn't it, where no matter how hard Square Enix tries more bots and hackers are just gonna keep appearing? That's depressing

It isn't this bad in any other MMO with the /tell spam really. SE is not helpless to combat this problem. Plenty of suggestions have been made, all of which they ignore.

[Kayden1010]

It isn't this bad in any other MMO with the /tell spam really. SE is not helpless to combat this problem. Plenty of suggestions have been made, all of which they ignore.

I'm tired of it...... I'm tired of accidentally ignoring my friend's tells because the other 70 percent of the time it's a spammer. I'm tired of trying read what friends are telling me but am being bombarded by spammers that won't stop...... I want to be able to receive tell's without the worry that is a spammer, and especially for the friends who need my help in the game. I'm tired of trying to contact my friends who make it harder cause they set themselves to "busy" online status cause the spammers are unrelenting.

[DreadRabbit]

http://i.imgur.com/qkNTxWQ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/PuCI6oz.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/rb45o8h.jpg

P.S. Note the timestamps.

Holy moly, YUP. There they are in all their horrifying glory. So compared to the sites I see commonly that's roughly seven websites. Filtering to ban the typing of seven websites has got to be easier than tracking down 11k accounts per week. It has to be.

[Niwashi]

If they could just add a filter that stops any /tell with a list of the most common offending website ads that would stop a lot. I don't know about other servers, but on Zalera it seems to be three main websites that are constantly at it.

I need to take screenshots as those names probably aren't accurate, but just about every /tell I get is from the same circle of 3-4 gil selling sites. And the pvp one puts spaces between the letters to make it harder to track. It can't be that hard to code that sort of detecting filter, could it? (honest question).

It wouldn't be hard to code, but for it to work they'd need to continuously keep updating their list of blocked "words". Spammers get around this sort of thing by using weird characters in place of the real ones, like writing "www" as "ωщω" or writing ".com" as "• Ç Ω /\/\" and similar variants on their main name, anything that looks close enough for a reader to figure out what it was intended to say.

In order to be effective, a text block list would have to keep being updated with whichever new workaround version the spammers start using. It turns into a race between how fast they can change the text in their ads and how fast SE can update the blocking. So this sort of thing can slow the spam down each time it has to be updated, but then some will get through next time it's SE's turn to need updating for their block list. If maintained well, it can produce some significant improvement, but not a cure.

We used to see this sort of weird spelling in the spam here (apparently from gilsellers assuming the normal versions would be blocked), but lately they haven't even been bothering with that. SE apparently isn't blocking even the standard fully-spelled-out versions of the website names.

[Avenger]

It's not that SE isn't doing anything at all - it's that whatever they're doing hasn't prevented spam from increasing drastically over the past month or so.

On our server, spammers have become particularly brazen and are even going back to /shout spam in all of the cities.

Given the severity of the spam problem and the large number of related forum threads, I'm surprised that I have yet to see a response from anyone on the community team.