automatic anti-RMT filter catching non-RMT messages?

[synesthetic]

Just had a strange episode in a linkshell.
One line my brother said didn't go through to anyone else in the linkshell. I thought he just forgot to say something, so I asked him to clarify, since he's in the same room as me. After confusion, discussion, viewing each other's screens, and repeated attempts to paste the line that no one else seemed to get, I'm thinking that the line is somehow getting caught as RMT-spam.

The specific line in question is..

"Going to log and shut the computer down. Computer needs a reboot... But I still think that the HDD might be dying."

Probably difficult to tell but.. has this sort of thing happened to anyone else?
Anyone have any clues on what in that benign statement could be getting caught on the filter?

edit: A few hours later, this was our guess:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post2941518

[Lilyarel]

Maybe the "com" in computer is being seen as RMT? Thats all I got.

[Gemma]

that's really weird, no idea why that particular sentence got flagged.
Should have told your brother to add a bunch of ♥'s in the sentence like RMT and seen if it let it pass haha

[SummerSkye]

The specific line in question is..

"Going to log and shut the computer down. Computer needs a reboot... But I still think that the HDD might be dying."

that's really weird, no idea why that particular sentence got flagged.
Should have told your brother to add a bunch of ♥'s in the sentence like RMT and seen if it let it pass haha

or have them add, "Hello, my friend" or "C'mon you know you want it" and see if it catches it then...haha

[SongJoohee]

Tried it out in-game. Found the cause:

"Going to log and shut the computer down. Computer needs a reboot... But I still think that the HDD might be dying."

.com

[Dualblade]

That...makes sense actually. First thing they'd do once they can't use .com is just move it a space over. Still sucks of course that this happened.

[Whiteroom]

Lol, its catches this, but not the hundred or so a day I get on Jenova...

[Darki]

Wait...there is actually some kind of effort being made at stopping RMT spam? Could of fooled me.

[Adire]

This is pretty scary.

Before it's all said and done, RMTs will gotten have many common things people say put on the filter, and yet they'll still find ways around filters and continue to spam. I've seen in happen in one other MMO I played, just that it had more overzealous censoring than it had spam filters.

I hope SE figures something out by then...I'd rather not have to often spend 2 minutes thinking of how to say a sentence without it triggering the filter. This "fix" won't be good in the long term.

[synesthetic]

A couple of friends and I have been having a blast playing with the filter trying to figure it out. The ". Com" was part of it, but then that begged the question of what in "Going to log and shut the computer down" was also being caught. Because you can paste websites in chat all of the time and be fine. And that first sentence on its own doesn't get blocked either.

Bit by bit, we pared the phrase down a word or letter at a time to see what would still get caught. At the end, we had seven letters matching an RMT site that commonly advertises in the game. So we had *******com.

edit: Since more than one person I've told this thread about doesn't understand what I just wrote here, I need to clarify by saying I deliberately omitted the RMT name so that this thread wouldn't get locked or something. There are seven stars instead of seven letters. If you already know some of the RMT groups there are, then you can probably fill in the blanks given the sentence I mentioned. The letters appear in order; duplicate letters out of order don't matter.

By that point, we found that the com at the end wasn't even needed to get the line blocked. Which is good. No one should be allowed to say the site's name.

After that we found that if you go *aa*aa*aa*aa*aa*aa*, it still gets blocked.
But just add one more set of a's to get *aaa*aaa*aaa*aaa*aaa*aaa*, and the filter stops catching it.
Now .com plays a role again. *aaa*aaa*aaa*aaa*aaa*aaa*com gets blocked. Or even *aaa*aaa*aaa*aaa*aaa*aaa*caaaoaaam.

We could be wrong, but so far we think that's the general idea behind why the original statement was blocked. The first sentence just happened to have the RMT's name scattered in it, and then the "com" in the second sentence's "Computer" was the last straw to make the filter block the entire statement.
Some of us have to sleep, so we couldn't explore the idea beyond that.


For the most part, I don't think anyone should worry too much about the filter erroneously omitting their lines, because the way this happened to work out was really unlikely, and the algorithm will most likely only get better.

If anyone else does find an innocuous statement getting blocked though, then I hope they post about it too. Because puzzling this out was easily the most fun I've had all week against all of the grind.