Bring back a /anon feature that counters RMT Spam bots.

[Ashkendor]

Eh. I've used the player search for legitimate reasons plenty of times, but I don't see any reason that a level 1 character would have to use it. Restricting the use for a higher level would make tell spamming tons harder.

[KaedrianLiang]

Eh.

There was an instance where an account was compromised because the account owner visited one of those account buying and selling websites that offer account value appraisals by entering your email. Once these websites get a hold of your email, your mail box will be littered with emails pretending to be the parent company of the game through suspension threats or promotions, asking you to login to your account through their provided link in the email to respond.

The phisher went as far as accurately IP and MAC address spoofing their machine to resemble the real account owner, so they managed to login on a level cap character and send out mass /tells about their appraisal website. It was dealt with swiftly. and a follow up general announcement from GM department to under no circumstances visit that website was sent out to players that received the spam. The investigation found that the Phisher used the parent website to retrieve a list of character names, there are countermeasures in place to prevent a bot from freely reviewing the website so it must have been an actual person that copy pasta'ed each name and put it on a notepad list.

That was a black unicorn occurrence where such a website managed to phish that much information about the account owner. The filter algorithm was upped to level cap level, after this event.

Bots have come very far since then, and are fully capable of reaching level cap in ffxiv, and in a short time where they can bypass any filter or procedure thats set up to regularly ban them

[Oce]

The only problem is it sounds like your company used complex algorithms that were frequently updated, as opposed to SE's method of covering their ears and pretending it will go away by banning the small fish. I really hope SE upgrades to a more sophisticated method of dealing with RMT.

[T2teddy]

You know, seriously, SE if y'all would just get rid of ALL the bots and spammers [who have paid accounts], all those player slots would soon be filled up by legit paying players!

I mean for crying out loud, what's so hard to understand about that?!

[OMEGA_HACK]

You know, seriously, SE if y'all would just get rid of ALL the bots and spammers [who have paid accounts], all those player slots would soon be filled up by legit paying players!

I mean for crying out loud, what's so hard to understand about that?!

They do get rid of them but its like a killing one of those spiders that carry all the babies on its back (Wolf Spider if you are interested, I won't post any pictures for those who might be squeamish) you kill one and a million more burst from the corpse of the one you just killed only worsening the problem.

On the /anon feature. If anything /anon will hide you from the search feature, but then all players will do this making the search obsolete, What if /anon made it where your name wouldn't show up unless your full name was searched for.

For example:
with /anon on if I searched

/sea forename a

My name Altrage A'uli would not come up in the list

however with /anon on if I searched

/sea all forename Altrage surname A'uli

then my name would appear.

This would allow the best of both worlds I would think. So just in case you run a dungeon with a really good player and you want to see if they are on your server you would be able to as you would have that players full name, versus an RMT would have to spend TONS of hours to cycle through every possible fore-/sur- name possibility on the chance of getting a hit with a real active player. It probably would not get rid of all RMT activity 100% but the frequency would drop tremendously with the possibility of it disappearing due to the low success rate they would encounter with a system like above.

At any rate I approve of a /anon feature to be added.

[Shori]

I'd be in support of a removal of the search tool - as it only works if the person is online and not engaged in duty anyway in which case I can just /tell + type their name. Makes the function rather pointless no? The only times I've ever trie dto use it is if I want to respond to someone from the forum whos posted in my server's subforum but it just doesnt work like that because of that issue.

Knowing RMT though, they'd find a way around it, like just adding characters who walk past a bot to a database that they will just spam even more.