did i miss it?

[PotatoWafflez]

I wasn't saying it was a permanent solution, only that it's what we have now :P I agree more needs to be done. But I'm not sure what you want them to do about /tells. If trial accounts/<X level accounts can't send tells, new players will have a lot of trouble getting help or answers answered if they have a friend to play with....otherwise they'd have to carry on conversations in /shout, which might be overrun with gil-spam anyways if /tell becomes restricted.

What's your proposed solution, though?

Trial accounts can't use /yell /shout and /tell its always been this way.
The game is so cheap on PC I would be surprised if any of these bots even run on a trial account.
So if anything this will have done nothing to fix the problem.

The only thing I can think that would have an usefulness would be just to have a modified busy mode that did everything that busy does but white lists your friend list so that you can still interact with those you want to.