Enough is enough, give us proper tools to deal with spammers

[MaeIsMean]

Two things are needed like... yesterday.

1) A right-click option to report a player for spamming. It takes too much work to report someone now, and most people don't bother. I would love an auto-silence (stop whispers from a player) after some high threshold of unique reports against a player (50? Something that would be difficult for a group of people to manipulate to hurt real players, but easy enough for a gil spammer to get if we had a quick way to send reports).

2) Allow friends and FC members to by-pass the tell filter put in place by /busy. I'd use busy, if I wasn't worried that my friends or FC members might try to send a tell and not be able to get through.

I know battling spammers is a long road, but I think it's ridiculous that our current options are to go through a complicated report process or to ignore all tells to avoid the nuisance. They have gotten alot worse lately, and I just want to play without being harassed every day.

[Canadane]

I'd also like it if when you removed someone from your friend list, it removes you from theirs. Accidentally accepting an RMTs friend request is the worst.

[BreathlessTao]

Would be nice if the many and more requests for these and other such would not still be going ignored...

[Syrehn]

I 100% support this thread; take all my likes.

Additionally we need a way to clean out the blacklist. Going 1 by one through 200 names is time consuming and tedious. We need a "Bulk Delete" feature.

[HyperiusUltima]

I wholly agree on what's being said in this topic, and I'd say that out of the suggestions, creating an auto-silence function isn't really a great thing, since it can be abused quite easily by one player inputting 50 unique reports.

[Sida]

Think the unique in this case meant, coming from x unique characters/accounts. Yes, a big linkshell or fc could still abuse it, but even that would leave quite a trace, what with all reports coming from members of same fc/linkshell. While it could inconvenience someone for a while appeal would later be clear case.

However if say, about hundred or more people who have nothing that connects them report same character/account in short while hitting them with immediate chat-ban would save rest from lot of grief.

[Bebekurenai]

The auto-silence after let's say 50 reports is good actually, but it has to be applied to the account. When I report in Excalibur, it takes max 5 minutes for the reported charachter (rmt) to be taken out. And I have the impression it's just me reporting since after the second repeat I get the GM answer and the guy is gone. But as said before, you can report characters all day if you have no better to do, they just make another and rinse/repeat. But you can't expect players to sit there and report all day.
We are here to play, not to watch out for rmts, I would suppose that's SE's job. Or give me a minion every 50 rmts and I gladly stop playing and will hunt them down. I play on ps4 and have to activate my wireless keyboard to copy/paste cause the ingame mouse doesn/t have a right click-copy/paste. Also it takes ages for the contact-us/fill-report window to load and then we have to give the details when it should be in the log anyways. So yes, we need a better report system, and it's about time now after more than 2 years since ARR launch to apply bans to accounts straight away rather than the character. SE, you get a copy of the spam log, what kind of investigation or proof do you still need?

[Niwashi]

To go along with the right-click report feature, SE needs to have someone watching and responding to those reports in real time. It won't work if they gather up a week's worth of reports, or even a day's worth, and then go through them. The spam would disappear if they combined three things:

(1) A rule that once you send a /tell, you cannot send another for a few seconds. Even a 3 or 4 second delay, too short to interfere with a legitimate /tell conversation, would be enough to ensure spammers aren't whispering more than 15 or 20 players per minute. Or, if they made it specific to restricting when they could next send a /tell to a different player, perhaps they could expand it to 5 or 6 seconds apart, so a spammer couldn't send their ads to more than 10 or 12 players per minute.

(2) Add the right-click "report RMT spam" feature to the chat log that we've been asking for for years now. (I'd also like to see "report harassment" both on the chat log and when interacting in person with another character, and a "report suspected bot" on character interaction, but the "report RMT spam" in the chat log is the one relevant to this topic, and the one that's most desperately needed based on frequency of the problem.) It should automatically include all relevant details (who sent the report, who was reported, and the text of the chat message reported) into the report, which should immediately pop up on the screen of whichever GM is assigned to handle these.

which brings us to:
(3) They need to have somebody on duty to handle these reports in real time as they come in. The reporting system then needs to be streamlined on the GM's end as well as on the players', so that the GM only has to glance at the report, see whether the message is indeed spam or not, and click on a button that says either "Yes, ToS violation RMT spam" (which immediately kicks out the offending spam bot and bans their account) or "No, unjustified report" (which just logs the fact that the reporting player sent a false report, so that later data mining can determine if anyone is abusing the system by repeatedly sending lots of false reports).

With this combination, spam bots could, for the most part, be banned within a minute or two (often within seconds) of sending their first /tell /say or /shout. Sure, occasionally some might last an extra 15 minutes or so if they start when the GM goes on his coffee break (assuming they'd only get someone to cover their position when they go on a longer lunch break). But thanks to (1) above even those spam bots lucky enough to get a few extra minutes would still only reach a tiny portion of the playerbase, and most would be gone after just their first few messages.

Not only would this get rid of the immediate spam bots, but the RMT companies would quickly find that this method of advertising is no longer cost effective. Spam bots that get banned after just a few messages are unlikely to find new buyers with those few messages, so will rarely bring in any income to justify the cost of setting them up. The current long-after-the-fact banning doesn't really accomplish anything because so long as the spam bots are bringing in money, then the RMT companies just keep replacing any bot that gets banned. But they won't keep replacing ones that are no longer effective. Soon after this immediate simple reporting and immediate simple banning goes into effect, the big RMT companies that have been plaguing the game will take their advertising elsewhere. Occasionally a newcomer to the market might try it out, and spread a few spam messages, but they wouldn't last long.

This in turn means that the job described in (3) of needing a GM to handle all these reports, is only a significant (likely full-time) responsibility for maybe the first week or so, only while clearing out all the spam bot accounts already in the game or the first few new ones created, before the RMT companies realize it doesn't work any more. After that, the number of spam bots, and therefore the number of reports, would drop off to an occasional trickle, and the GM handling them could spend the majority of his/her time on other responsibilities. (Of course, when a report does come in, they'd still need to have someone available to handle it immediately. As mentioned, newcomers to the market will try out spam from time to time, and it's important that whenever they do, they find it unproductive.)

[Lucke]

This in turn means that the job described in (3) of needing a GM to handle all these reports, is only a significant (likely full-time) responsibility for maybe the first week or so, only while clearing out all the spam bot accounts already in the game or the first few new ones created, before the RMT companies realize it doesn't work any more. After that, the number of spam bots, and therefore the number of reports, would drop off to an occasional trickle, and the GM handling them could spend the majority of his/her time on other responsibilities. (Of course, when a report does come in, they'd still need to have someone available to handle it immediately. As mentioned, newcomers to the market will try out spam from time to time, and it's important that whenever they do, they find it unproductive.)

SE could hire an intern still in school for this job.

Pay them peanuts and I'm sure they wouldn't care. It's EXP in the business. Just on these forums I see people volunteering to read these reports for free (waived sub fee). Of course the players are biased and that could be an issue. If they get players to do it, have a suitable punishment for banning people they don't like, like banning their account for life or something.

[Niwashi]

SE could hire an intern still in school for this job.
Pay them peanuts and I'm sure they wouldn't care. It's EXP in the business. Just on these forums I see people volunteering to read these reports for free (waived sub fee).

Yeah, just going through one spam report after another after another identifying whether they're legit or not would be the sort of incredibly simple and incredibly boring work that's generally foisted off onto interns or other low paid temp workers. That's likely what they'd use to cover the initial surge of reporting. Once that initial surge is over and spam bots and the ensuing spam reports become a rare occurrence, then that responsibility could be passed on to the regular GM team, who should only have to deal with it occasionally after that point.