Quote Originally Posted by Theodric View Post
Besides, if they did ban thousands of players then that'd open the door to people asking why they haven't banned the hundreds of players who hang around in Ul'dah on Balmung and Mateus with explicit search info.
I'm guessing that no one—or at least very few people—reports those players? Maybe they just figure someone else will, and so ignore them. Either way, I would be reasonably willing to put down a bet that folks are reporting people they perceive as abusive/rude/toxic a lot more frequently than they report explicit search info. And in general, it seems like the game's moderators are willing to let things slide if they aren't bothering anyone (witness that people parsing for personal use don't seem to be a concern); the corollary to that is that if people don't report that a thing is bothering them, it seems like the game's moderation folks aren't likely to take action.

Also, it gets really hard to write code that can automatically recognize stuff as people get creative in avoiding automated systems. Let's say they want to address the gil sellers who shout their URLs. So they block URLs in shouts, and now you end up without folks able to do things like shout a hunt train Discord link or a Eureka tracker link. Meanwhile, the gil sellers are shouting their URLs with unicode characters replacing chunks of them, and then adding a second shout with '<symbol> = pba' or whatever, so you go back and substitute to get the real URL or search term. A human can follow the context there, but that's a really tricky machine recognition problem.

I'm not surprised they'd rely on human reports before acting on anything.