Battling the spam

[SaintPaul 1]

I've had previous ideas on this subject and posted here, but devs said No. So I've been thinking, how about this...

Idea for battling the gold spam as follows:

Give players the ability to report a player for spam, making it very easy to do. Something like right clicking a name in a chat window and clicking a ‘Report spam’ link.

Have the system record the number of individual spam reports against a specific account and if it reaches a certain threshold automatically punish that account.

For example if 20 players report an account silence it for an hour as a first offence, the second time longer, and third forever.  Whatever, I’ll leave the specifics up to the devs, the point here is this is an automated defence that would be effective against them and difficult to abuse. 20 people won’t report an innocent player.

You can then remove the current system which seems to punish those trying to build groups for dungeons etc.

You could even take it a step further, for example if 2FA is enabled on an account after a perm chat ban, automatically remove the ban and reset the report count, as this means that account was hacked but has now been recovered by the genuine owner.

Everyone wins here, players can shut up spammers (as a collective) and admins don’t have to ban accounts for gold spam because the automated system will take care of all of it.  Also importantly, no single player has any power they can abuse.

[Storfan 24]

Making click-report available would also mean it would get abused, that is the trade-off you'd have to be willing to make. Also it would generate more work for admins because of malicious reports.

[SaintPaul 1]

You read my whole post right?  My idea means a number of players would have to report anyone before any action was taken.

Probably a large number of players, how could this be abused?

[Roxanne Flowers 15]

I'm probably the only one thinking it would be nice for the GMs to have a tool which can automatically check to see if a character has been Ignored by {insert threshold} number of other characters.  I'm thinking a threshold limit of like being put on 200+ other characters' Ignore lists ought to be sufficient.  So all the tool is doing, as a batch process, is checking to see How Annoying™ some characters have been to have gotten put onto that many Ignore lists concurrently ... which basically means they're guilty of spamming in some form or fashion, essentially.

That then triggers a ... review ... of the offending character's communications history (chat, tells, mail, etc.) so that the GMs can access the evidence needed to wield the BANHAMMER™ should it prove warranted, based on evidence.

In other words, give the GMs a tool that makes their job of "policing" the in-game communications systems easier to do based on the "density" of IGNOREs a particular character has earned.  It would be an easy filtering method to find the most obvious repeat offenders so as to bring character IDs to the attention of game staff for review, rather than triggering an automatic action.  One of those "if THIS many people have put you on Ignore, maybe we should look into why" kinds of things.

A game is only as good as the tools given to its Players ... and the Staff who work to maintain the game.  I'm thinking this would be one of those Nice To Have™ features for internal staff use to bring Repeat Offenders to the attention of GM staff.  Just run the batch process periodically and have it generate reports of character names for the GMs to follow up on when/if they have time to review character communication histories.

It also means that every time a Player puts a character on Ignore, that's one more "vote" for staff to review the communications history of that character.  Once there are enough "votes" for that review, game staff can be automatically notified that enough people have determine that a specific character has been ... pestiferous ... and should be reviewed for ... obnoxiousness.

[SaintPaul 1]

Not a bad idea Roxanne, however some players (myself included) don't bother using the ignore function. For 2 reasons:

1) Anyone spamming won't normally be doing it for long on that character. A few days and they'll normally create a new character/account to annoy people with.

2) The ignore list has a limited amount of people you can add to it, eventually it gets full (probably of people who are no longer using that character)

The ignore feature is good against genuine players who annoy you, but not great against spammers.  Just my opinion obviously :)

[Storfan 24]

1 hour ago, PeterGriffen said:

You read my whole post right?  My idea means a number of players would have to report anyone before any action was taken.

Probably a large number of players, how could this be abused?

I'll tell you how. Lets pretend some unfortunate soul in world chat draws the irritated ire of some 20-or-so people and they say: "Hey, lets report this dude because we dont like him" - BAM!

Now GM gotta handle this (possibly) false flag. GM time wasted. Overall service to the community suffers.

This is very hypothetical ofcourse.

[SaintPaul 1]

4 minutes ago, Storfan said:

I'll tell you how. Lets pretend some unfortunate soul in world chat draws the irritated ire of some 20-or-so people and they say: "Hey, lets report this dude because we dont like him" - BAM!

Now GM gotta handle this (possibly) false flag. GM time wasted. Overall service to the community suffers.

This is very hypothetical ofcourse.

If someone does something in world chat that draws the irritated ire of some 20-or-so people do they not deserve the punishment anyway?  They should not be putting whatever it was that upset so many people in a public channel anyway.

It not just stops spam but encourages responsible behaviour in public channels.  If anything your argument seems to support my idea (in my opinion anyway) I appreciate that's not what you intended.

[Storfan 24]

35 minutes ago, PeterGriffen said:

If someone does something in world chat that draws the irritated ire of some 20-or-so people do they not deserve the punishment anyway?  They should not be putting whatever it was that upset so many people in a public channel anyway.

It not just stops spam but encourages responsible behaviour in public channels.  If anything your argument seems to support my idea (in my opinion anyway) I appreciate that's not what you intended.

You're making the incorrect assumption that all kinds of (in the communities eyes: "anti-social behavour") deserve a punishment. I'm going to use another analogy:

Quote

 

[5]. Storfan: LF1M: BRD-EMP. Ironfoe reserved.

[5]. PeterGriffen: omg he's reserving items, what an asshole. EVERYONE please report him for being a dick.

[5]. RandomGamer: Sure man, I hate reserves too, *Grabs pitchfork*, reported!

 

Is that enough of an example for you to see why a click-report system can be abused? I'm not saying it will happen, but it very well could. There are numerous occations where people can report someone en-masse for nothing except *pitchforks*.

 

EDIT: spelling

Edited February 14, 2017 by Storfan

[SaintPaul 1]

You do make a valid point but I think that scenario is very unlikley and even if it does occur rarely, much less hassle than it currently is for the dev team trying to deal with all the current spam/hacking issues.

I am only throwing out ideas here you understand, it sickens me that people have volunteered their time and hard work to a volunteer project like this, that is free for all to enjoy only to have it targeted by gold sellers, who spam and steal accounts and generally make the place unpleasent.

You can't expect human policing of issues like this on a volunteer service because that is just too time time consuming, an automated solution is the best we are going to get. At least this way it puts players in charge of that system and gives us some say about who should be punished by it.

However maybe you are right and that isn't a good idea.

Edited February 14, 2017 by PeterGriffen

[smokeit 26]

off-topic: PeterGriffen please change your display name in the forum account options to 'PeterGriffin' just so I can read your posts and comments in peace.

[SaintPaul 1]

I'm not following?  what good would that do?

[Ashtoroth 0]

I liked VanillaGaming's solution to this. The player vote shop has a gold reward(it isn't much really, 10g for 3 votes, 20 for 6 or 100 for 9 with it being 12h per 3 votes, that may be a little much for here but this is about concept, not details). Once this was implemented gold sellers dried up, I still see the occasional one over there,  but its become quite rare. Also has the added side-benefit of free advertising for the server.

[Storfan 24]

7 hours ago, ketzerei84 said:

I liked VanillaGaming's solution to this. The player vote shop has a gold reward(it isn't much really, 10g for 3 votes, 20 for 6 or 100 for 9 with it being 12h per 3 votes, that may be a little much for here but this is about concept, not details). Once this was implemented gold sellers dried up, I still see the occasional one over there,  but its become quite rare. Also has the added side-benefit of free advertising for the server.

And that would put us on a slippery slope towards giftshop-p2w-custom-server.