Spam Sentry
 

I know everyone hates to hear comparisons between EQ2 and WoW, but IMO they are both good games and both have good AND bad traits. Most importantly, they both share a lot of common problems.

One problem that both games share is spammers. Generally spammer-botsfrom the frauds who want to steal our money by selling game gold or power leveling services or some other item or service that is definitely unethical and is likely to get us banned. [If you disagree with me about whether those people are frauds, whether frauds are thieves, or whether it is unethical to do any of these things, please leave it for another thread.]

One of the modders for WoW developed a mod called Spam Sentry. That mod was SO effective that the flood of reports it generated by trapping tells from the spammers and automating the reporting process actually prodded Blizzard into changing their system. Now, it only requires a right-click on a spammer's name to report them, AND it does not generate a ticket, so you can report spammers as often as they happen, BUT they also FINALLY put a filter in to block those bot-generated names so that there are very few spammers sending messages. They finally made it hard for the spammers to create those bot-players to send their spam messages without investing more money into the programming and accounts than it is worth! Maybe that's why I seem to get 2-5 spam messages on EQ2 every two minutes now?

I know this is a long-winded post, but I had to put all that in to make my request make sense. What I am wondering is - How hard would it be to duplicate what was done for WoW and create a Spam Sentry for EQ2?

If it could be done, it would certainly make a lot of players happier! Not only that, but it might finally prompt SOE to go ahead and concentrate on FIXING a problem instead of ignoring it as long as possible. Flooding them with reports on spammers will definitely get it across that this really IS a serious problem AND give them documentation to DO something about it. The biggest problem up till now has been that it has been a royal pain to make those reports and the spammers are flooding out the channels you need to type in half the time.

In fact, I have noticed that a lot of players seem to be holding their conversations in the OOC channel to avoid using the Tell channel. Perhaps because they have the Tell channel turned Off as a crude way to block the spammers? [Yes, I know that some of them are just ignorant of proper etiquette.]

I'd have to take a good look at the "Spam Sentry" to give a 100% sure reply, but to the best of my knowledge it just can't be done.
We as interface author's are very limited as to what we can do with EQ2...

I can say though that I've heard if you just go /anon they can't see you in the channel and therefore can't spam you via the /listchannel command.
I haven't verified it 100% yet, but ever since I went /anon i haven't received any tells or in game mail from spammers...

There are some simple ways to alleviate the issue. Nothing effective has been implemented by SOE yet. So far as I can figure, there's no way for us to implement these via the UI. SOE needs to step up to the plate though, cause it is annoying as all get out.

I'd like to see an option that blocks tells from people not on your friends list if their under lvl 10 and you're not. -- It wouldn't totally remove spam, but it would make it more time-consuming and thus more costly for spammers to be able to solicit such large groups.

How about a AiM like /tell throttle? If someone sends too many tells too fast to too many people, revoke their /tell rights and alert a GM.

From what I've read, scripting in WoW uses LUA while UI scripting in EQ2 is much more limited. I don't think what you're asking is possible in EQ2. There's a very, very long thread about the spam problem though so I'm pretty sure they're aware of it.

These were my suggestions in that thread:

1. Tell throttling. Limit tells to one every two seconds (or some reasonable number.) This could easily be done within the client so it wouldn't even affect the server code. These spammers are obviously sending out hundreds of /tells per minute.

2. One click reporting. Reporting spam has to be quick and easy. Reporting mail spam is done this way-- you click on the spam button and you click a second time on a confirmation window. Reporting /tell spam takes far too long and you can't even /report more than once every 5 minutes when we get spam every 2 or 3 minutes! Petitioning takes too long and you can only have one petition open at a time. We need to be able to click on a name, report spam, and then click on a confirmation window. Done!

3. Automatic /tell gagging. After 25 (or some number) spam reports are filed against one account no tells are allowed from that account. If the account tries to send another /tell they get a polite response, "You have been reported by at least 25 players for spamming. You are not allowed to send any more tells. A GM will contact you on their findings. You may /petition for help if you think you have been wrongfully accused of spamming. Thank you for your patience." If one player griefs another player by reporting them for spamming... nothing happens. After 25+ players report one account for spamming, all 25 reports are grouped together and automatically filed as a petition that a GM can handle in one fell swoop, thus saving GM time in the process.

Those things would be nice... but as far as I know, all the tells and such are handled server-side and as such you have no control over them besides the commands they give you.

Thanks for all the replies, but...
 

Thanks for the replies, but I evidently did not make it clear what Spam Sentry did and what WoW did OR I somehow mixed the two together.

Othesus, you are absolutely correct in stating that Othesus and pooka, you both had some very nice suggestions, but - as you both noted - none of those are things that are likely to be possible for a modder. None of those things WERE done by Spam Sentry, BUT WoW DID implement:

1. Some type of filter to prevent spammers from quickly and easily creating throw-away characters with nonsense names just to send out a rapid-fire batch of spam tells before they delete them. In essence, bot-spammers - that are easily recognizable by their names like qnmkljh, qwsdarftg, asdfgtrb, etc. - spend about two minutes to create a character, send out a batch of spam, delete the character, and repeat the cycle. WoW made it MUCH harder for a BOT to come up with an acceptable name, so the incidence of spammers has decreased significantly.

2. One click reporting. They made reporting spam quick and easy - right-click on a name, report spam, and then click on a confirmation window. They also made reporting mail spam the same way - click on the spam button, then click a second time on a confirmation window. Reporting /tell spam no longer generates a ticket, so you can report /tell spam as often as it occurs. MUCH faster AND easier than before.

What Spam Sentry did was:

1. Trap incoming messages in the Chat Window based on BOTH content AND the name and level of the sender. When such messages were detected, they were copied into a queue and you were given an alert that you had one or more spammers to report. This gave you a copy of the time, name, and content of the spammer's tell to send in, but you could report multiple spammers in one report.

2. Watch for "bot-like" behavior and alert you to it to allow you to report it.

3. Allow you to let it automatically block tells in your chat window from anyone under a certain level unless they were on your friends list.

4. Allow you to let it put anyone who was annoying you on your Ignore List AND send them a message to leave you alone or they would be reported for harassment.

5. It also had a form of Tell Throttling that made it react to a large number of tells from anyone not on your Friends list in a short period of time, unless you were responding to them, and block those tells. It would then ask you if you wanted to report the player for harassment.

6. Allow YOU, the player, to choose when and who you reported. No being interrupted in the middle of a fight to report some jerk because he is trampling all over your chat window. Spam Sentry just filtered all those tells out and you didn't see them, just a small message saying it had trapped a spam message. It also reminded you to review before reporting someone to avoid reporting someone who was innocent. The BIG advantage was that you could report spammers in BATCHES.

Does this sound like something you would like to have? If you want to take a look at Spam Sentry, you can download it at http://www.wowinterface.com/download...fo.php?id=5552

I'm not certain, but I do believe that some of these things CAN be done via the Chat Window interface, even in EQ2, simply by using the expedient of trapping and filtering before displaying the actual text. All of which should be possible in XML from what I have seen in some of the code used in existing mods.

However, I wanted to ask first to see if there is someone more experienced in coding XML than I am who is willing to do it.

It simply can't be done in EQ2. To do this you would need a scripting language more powerfull then EQ2 employees.

The very basic need of such a mod would require one to be able to analyze the text coming from the server and that isn't even remotely possible in EQ2 so that kills the project from the start.

We have a simple button to report spam in our mail. Anything else has to be done by SOE as I don't think any of that is possible through UI mods.