Curse

bilateralrope · Aug 10, 2007, 12:00 PM // 12:00

For someone to advertise a gold selling website in-game, they need to give out the URL. So what I'm proposing is that if a chat message in any channel contains a known gold selling URL (by now ANET should have a large list of them) or any free URL redirection service, then it is suppressed so that no-one sees it. This will force the gold sellers to either try to get around the filter by mangling their URL, which will make it harder for people to actually reach their website. Or they could obtain a new URL, but this will cost them money and will get blocked once ANET finds out about it.

Naturally spaces and invisible characters will be treated by this filter as if they weren't there. For instance "h g u i l d w a r s . c o m" is treated as "hguildwars.com" by the filter, which would be suppressed if guildwars.com was on the ban list (picking a site I know ANET won't block).

I also see two ways to make this better:
- If someone triggers a suppression, then their account is flagged for ANET to investigate for a banning (just checking the context of their suppressed message should be enough to see if they were flagged by mistake or not). The more they trigger it, the sooner their account gets looked at.
- If a message is suppressed, it will still show up on the senders client. This way it will be harder for the spammers to know they are being suppressed, unless they take one of their farming accounts away from farming to check that the message is still working.

TheRaven · Aug 10, 2007, 02:11 PM // 14:11

I hate to rain on your parade because I think it's a good idea. However it won't work. I know from experience.

I play on Pogo.com and they have the same problem with folks selling auto-cheat programs for their games. The bot spammers pop into the game rooms and spam:
"Want to win the big jackpot? Free tokens while you sleep. goto www.<insert cheat site here>.com"

Running these cheats is against Pogo's EULA and will get your account banned just like GW. Pogo started to filter out the spam messages just like you're proposing.

So, the bot spammers start spamming "goto www.c h e a t s i t e.com" just like you said.

Then Pogo filtered any message with ".com" or "www" in it.

Spammers then spammed "Goto vv vv vv.c h e a t s i t e.c0m"

The filter starts filtering for the vv 's and ".c0m"

Spammers start spamming. "Cheap cheats! Goto
w
w
w
.
c
h
e
a
t
s
i
t
e
.
c
o
m
"

It was a losing battle. No matter what Pogo filtered, the bots found a message that bypassed it.

Henchman · Aug 10, 2007, 04:55 PM // 16:55

Just like "WTS" could be evaded with "W T S", "WT$", "{W}TS", and plenty others, this could probably be evaded as well.
But if they still feel like trying, they have my permission..

bilateralrope · Aug 10, 2007, 10:44 PM // 22:44

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheRaven

Spammers start spamming. "Cheap cheats! Goto
w
w
w
.
c
h
e
a
t
s
i
t
e
.
c
o
m
"

I'll admit that I hadn't thought about them doing this. However if guildwars is set to limit the rate at which they can send messages (doesn't GW already suppress your chat if you spam too much ?) it will cause them problems if they try this. I mean, how many people will scroll up the chat history to get a URL that is one character per line, with other chat messages between them.

And we could probably also have the server watching for when someone does this, and when it does occur two things happen:
- Everyone sees a message warning that buying gold will get your account banned.
- When the spammer is partway through the URL, they get a warning that they are typing in a known gold selling URL and are in danger of triggering an automatic ban. If they then continue it, they will get an automatic temp ban which is disclosed to everyone in that district.
Anyone who is in danger of typing it in by accident should see the warning. Anyone thinking of buying gold will see the spammer type the URL, which is then followed by the following:
- "Buying gold is against the EULA and will get you banned. {player name} is now banned for x days for advertising a gold selling website."

Quote:

Just like "WTS" could be evaded with "W T S", "WT$", "{W}TS", and plenty others, this could probably be evaded as well.
But if they still feel like trying, they have my permission..

The more they mangle their URL, the harder it is for someone to translate that into an actual URL.