[Klaipeda] 📣 SHOUT BOT SPAM 📣 POTENTIAL SOLUTION?

[Avidity]

@STAFF_John @STAFF_Ines @STAFF_Ethan @STAFF_J

This is my very first forum post… let me start by saying that I REALLY love the game and I would hate to see you guys lose potential players because of this chat spam bullshit.

As of now (5/8/2016) Klaipeda has more bot spammers in shout chat than actual players. Meeting new people, finding a group or just having a fun conversation in shout is no longer a thing. Most of my friends have resorted to keeping shout chat disabled at all times.

By no means I have a perfect ready to go solution for all of your problems. I also understand that you work hard to appease a lot of people and you don’t have time to reply to everyone. I’d give you a hug because of all the hate you get, and nonsense you have to deal with.

---

Anyway here are some of my ideas that can hopefully help defeat this cancer chat spam, or at least assist you with whatever brainstorm you got going on with your devs:

1. Manually blacklist confirmed game currency website sellers.

Most gold sellers try to advertise one website while building up their brand. Smaller gold selling ‘‘companies’’ simply do not have the resources and/or time to spam in-game on the same scale as bigger companies.

• Big gold selling company = In-game spam
  Can afford to buy accounts for spam & burn (getting an account for the sole purpose of delivering as much spam as possible before it gets banned). If enough profit was made with spam & burn accounts then they rinse & repeat. Also generally participate in stealing accounts to spam and or resell valuable currency.

• Small gold selling company = Mostly uses SEO for traffic
  They have no budget for and/or moral reasons against in-game spam.

I’ll try to focus on big gold selling companies that actually affect in-game players, thankfully they are few in numbers.

Create an algorithm that recognizes bad text patterns of predefined badlist (for example) and only displays bad messages to the sender (since you don’t want the bad guys to know that they are being muted).

For example if someone spams ‘‘buy cheap gold at silverbuy.com’’ you can show that spam to all the logged in accounts of that spammers IP (only client side spammer will see the message) while filtering it as spam for everybody else. To the spammers it’ll seem as though their ways are working fine, making them waste more time. Meanwhile you can continue to collect more data from these bots without having to disrupt player experience.

Of course eventually they’ll catch on and start buying proxy domains for redirection. With your existing report system it shouldn’t be hard to detect new domains that are linked to bad websites.

I understand that no developer wants an active GM policing tens of thousands of concurrent players so here’s a more ambitious way… Why not have a program check if any URLs in shout chat redirect back to blacklisted URLs. If it does - add to blacklist.

---

Example in the works:

MrBadMan - yo yo yo buy gold at silverbuy.com

Your GM team checks that website & blacklists it.

MrBadMan - yo yo yo buy gold at s i l v e r b u y,com

Your algorithm detects it as spam and the message is only shown to IPs of the spammer.

MrBadMan - yo yo yo im gonna buy proxy domain & redirect it to silverbuy.com

MrBadMan - yo yo yo buy gold at c h e a p s i l v e r b u y.com

Your program recognizes it as potential spam and tries to access that particular website, if redirected to silverbuy.com then proxy website will also be added to the blacklist assosiated with silverbuy.com.

MrBadMan - yo yo yo buy gold at c h 3 a p g 0 1 d . c0 m

Your protection doesn’t get it but player reports make your GMs take manual action and furthermore improve your algorithm? Rinse and repeat, your protection gets even better with time and spammers become very sad. You can also make shout messages reportable.

---

Summary overview:

Come up with 3 layers of security to battle chat spammers

1. Manually blacklist gold selling websites you see in chat

2. Create a very aggressive algorithm that recognizes bad text patterns from predefined blacklist.

3. Create a program to check all potential URLs in chat, if non blacklisted URLs redirects to an existing blacklist URLs, program will add new associated URLs to blacklist.

–

This should stop the majority of existing chat spam (up to 99% of bots will easily get hit over and over again and will not be able to send a single message of spam). While gold sellers website spam will be non existent, few spammers will likely resort to using throw away emails/skype/icq accounts for continued advertisement via shout and chat in general.

That’s all from me. I hope I was able to help a little.

Thank you for creating such an amazing game!

---

[mightyshinn]

LKchat solves all your problems.

[Avidity]

Did you even read my post? Was I not clear enough?

“This type off thing wont work”
Please elaborate. I didn’t see a single reason why.

“IMC needs to make a Shadow-ban Shout,”
You pretty much saying what I suggested about IP spam client side only. Yet you don’t explain anything… it’s the equivalent of typing ‘‘IMC needs to remove bots’’ your post explained nothing.

Now would you kindly elaborate why my idea is bad and will not work to stop a huge majority of spammers? I honestly don’t think you understood what I wrote, I’ll consider revising later.

[Sumerr]

This is my idea, took a while to write it all but totally worth it,

This type off thing wont work in the larger scope of things the best thing that would do anything would be so called “Boots on the Ground.” Simple tactic many games have employed it to success GM’s in the game not out looking for the bots actually making money they have already put that on every player and people were so happy.

First, the biggest and most important thing is F2P is here bans are worthless now, 2 days at most they will have to buy the 100 TP pack mind you almost always with stolen credit cards so IMC never gets the money or very little of the people to stupid to look. So IMC needs to make a Shadow-ban Shout, so that these and many suspected bots are only shouting at each other then they can buy their 100 tp packs all they wont and shout all day long.

Second, and a really big thing we know how small IMC is and rotational GMs is just not feasible right now so it is time to take it player driven. Player GMs with limited to full power but everything on these accounts monitored so they do not abuse their power. They can then just sit there and shadow-ban bots when they have time and want to log into their GM account. Give their main account a small amount of TP a week like 20-50, I even know people that would do it for free.

As a added thing they have to spend at least a set amount of hours on the Gm account to receive the TP for the week, this way they acctually work though knowing most people including myself I would be happy to give up some of my play time to make the game a better place.

This also brings up their ability to abuse and since you do know the main account if they want TP or not I believe it needs to be connected just losing the GM account will not stop some people they need to know if they do something minor it happens but someone abusing should lose their main account for a few days and be blocked from a GM account forever.

The last point I have to bring up to this that makes it worth it is as these people go longer and longer as Player GMs they unlock more powers sort of a reward for hard work. Things like being able to start events or even temporally banning bots so you can review them before saying yes or no on it is a bot and getting rid of it. The community here would drive itself IMC could then focus more on content and people would police the game they love and want to be great.

At the end of the day the thing it as someone is going to do it on a private server this is Ragnarok all over again. If you can’t see that much you are blind, why then shouldn’t IMC make the original better then the clones to come before they come.

To the LKchat response yes this helps the people who don’t think it is a problem to use mods like this. Time will tell if these mod will be 100% approved to stay or not. What happens when tomorrow IMC say get rid of your mods today or get banned you have to look at pleb chat like the rest of us or use LKchat at your own risk.

[Avidity]

I have no idea what you’re talking about. My solution covers that and so much more. I guess I didn’t explain myself clearly, was up pretty late last night. I’ll revise the OP later today and describe everything in more detail. My original post was catered to TOS developers and not players. Sorry if you couldn’t understand something.

Updated OP to make it easier to understand.

[nuclearmissile]

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

[joepjanson]

Whilst it does help against the spammers… There’s plenty of people that get unintentionally blocked… for sharing a link to a imgur, or a funny website, or whatever… Often times you don’t notice it either.

A good friend of mine noticed me on his blacklist because I made a shout about the EU discord community, which included the invite link.

False positives are just as shitty as spambots… this equates to making a banning algorithm to ban bots, which also bans a smalla mount of players without notifying you properly… >_>

[NegativeZero]

Not to mention that they couldn’t exactly start banning just because people post website URLs without first notifying the community that it’s against the rules… Unless it already is?

Anyway, a 30-60 second spam filter in Shout chat, and removing the ability to post duplicate messages back-to-back would reduce the spam, if nothing else… Could even make it so that attempts to post the same messages over and over would increase the timer. Problem is, that some RMT advertisers will then set it up so that it changes the message ever-so-slightly (or entirely) to bypass the multi-post filter, unless it’s sophisticated enough to check the entire message for similarities. Still, they’d have to deal with that 30-60 second spam filter.

[Akira.Yatsu]

Honestly, I bump this because its much better, and much nicer than what most people will write to IMC.

YOU GUIZ ARE HORRIBLE AT GAMZ, IMC YOU SUCK

Nope, not going there.

I ain’t no expert in spam filters and anti-botting programs, so I’ll just say that I think its a good idea to set a nice little program to help eliminate those stupid useless spams.

At least I hope one of the GMs or Mods reads this and pays attention.