Player Discussion on How to Resolve Unsolicited Advertisements in the Forums

Well, that's all fine and good, except that now we have a gimped e-mail system... And we still have spammers. Even if they do something like limit trial accounts on the forums as some have suggested, okay, maybe we have fewer spam messages on the forums, but they'll continue moving on to something else. Then we'll have gimped e-mail, gimped posting privileges... And we'll still have spam.

You can never get to the point where we can remove, "... And we'll still have spam," from that list. All you will end up doing is add more and more stuff that legitimate players can't do.

I'm not saying that they shouldn't take steps to stop spammers, I just think that limiting what legitimate users can do is not the answer. Increased moderation? Good idea. Filters? Good idea. Honeypots? Great idea. Creating tools to allow moderators to more effeciently and effectively ban accounts? Great idea. Having some sort of community moderation program? Good idea. Disabling or crippling [insert feature here]? Bad idea.

Nah, they'd just have to set up clear rules from the outset. The biggest one would probably be that if you moderate a non-RMT post, you'd obviously be dropped as a volunteer moderator. If you actually did something like moderate someone you're having an argument with, you might even get your own account banned.

Honestly, I can't imagine why someone who is a volunteer moderator would feel all big and important. I mean, sure, it might be neat if they entrusted you with the privilege, but even if you broadcasted to everyone, "HEY! I'm a volunteer moderator!", there'd be no way to prove it without possibly risking your own account. Even if you posted something like, "Watch, everyone, I'm about to moderate that RMT thread!" and *poof!* there goes the thread, there's no way to prove that you did it--and even if everyone believes you, at least you've still done something constructive. All everyone else would see is is a link to an "Access Denied" message in your post. Obviously, if you do something like, "Watch this, I'll moderate your thread," *poof!* there goes your account for being so stupid.

No-one's asking for the business to police EVERYTHING, but the business cannot afford times when they are policing NOTHING. No-one here is asking that the mods "sense" spam threads and delete them on their own, but when people report a thread as spam, it CANNOT be allowed to exist for another 12-14 hours without anyone taking action. They CANNOT allow this much dead space of zero moderation.

I agree with the statement above yours - they need to ensure there is at least one moderator on at all times, such that when someone files a moderator report, it's acted upon in short order, not half a day after the fact and 50 reports later.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Wait, what gimped e-mail system? The last thing that was done to it was to make it even more powerful. What did they do to gimp it?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Trial Accounts can still use the Help channel, at least they could last I checked. What's the problem with that?

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Read the quote he was responding to (mine). The Help tab is broken, not the Help channel.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

When they added the option to only accept e-mails from friends and/or supergroup mates. Yes, I consider that "gimping" the e-mail system. The only reason that was added was due to the RMT spammers. My contention during the whole time that was being considered (and in posts where people were proposing everything from an option to disable e-mail to removing the system entirely) was that yes, it will solve the spam-by-e-mail problem, but people are sadly mistaken if they think that it will solve the spam problem or that it won't have negative repercussions to legitimate communication.

My contention the whole time was that they need to take a more holistic approach to solving the spam problem via things such as honeypots, increased moderation, better moderation tools, etc. Since they've dinked around with the e-mail options, I've seen both increased RMT posts here on the forums and increased instances of RMTers advertising their wares in the local channel in-game in high-population areas.

Until they attack spam as a spam problem and not as a problem with specific communication channels, it's going to continue and, I daresay, become increasingly annoying.

At any rate, I'm not referring to the new global e-mail/attachments functionality. That's pretty cool.

Yes, they're all dead. I was off in my prediction by an hour.

I'm sorry, but I just don't get that. They gimped the system by allowing people to choose who to accept messages for? By the same token, the "Not Looking For Team" option could be said to have broken teaming in general. I don't agree with you here in the slightest. I enjoy having the option to turn off e-mail from strangers, or e-mail in general. I don't use it, but HAVING it is better than not having it.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I don't buy the legal liability, but they should absolutely have more of a mod presence here, especially on the weekend. This has always been the case.

I'm an admin for a busy forum for a pay site and at any given time we've got a couple of admins and between five and ten mods hanging out keeping an eye on things. It's not directly relateable since NC has to pay people to do the job, but at the very least the mods we have could spend more time hanging out here and less time doing whatever sort of office chores they get saddled with.

I don't consider that gimping at all. I consider it giving more control to the individual user. Some people choose to have absolutely draconian filtering on their email (in-game, real life, etc). That's their choice.

Me, I have no filtering on my in-game email and none on my RL email beyond my ISP filtering it all into 2 folders by default (Inbox and what they think is Spam).

Yes. I admit, it sounds paradoxical, but here's the rationale behind the statement.

I have never, ever seen calls to implement this feature except in relation to RMT spam. In fact, RMT spam was practically non-existent before Issue 9, and up to that point, I had never seen anyone ever have any problem with e-mail at all, except a question now and then on how to use it.

At that time, I was really active in the Taxibots, and I used e-mail pretty heavily to send reminders about our events, macros and keybind commands, supergroup policies, and so on. No, this wasn't "spam," because all anyone ever had to do was to say, "Hey, stop sending me this stuff," and I would have. (But for the record, no one ever did.) It especially came in handy in sending a short summary of the supergroup rules to people, since the Taxibots aren't like most mainstream supergroups, before inviting them so that they kind of knew what they were getting into. I would also use it pretty regularly to send help or other information to other players I met.

However, after Issue 9, e-mail pretty much became known as a spam delivery device. Believe me, I wanted the spam stopped probably more than anyone; I found myself ending up blocked by people because in their haste to empty their inboxes, they would click through my e-mails while hitting the Ignore Spammer button. More than once, someone told me, "What do you mean I have you gignored? I didn't do that!" Yes, you did, you must have tagged one of my e-mails as spam. "Oh, sorry!"

So anyway, instead of taking further measures to cure the spam problem, they implemented this don't-accept-e-mails "feature." In pretty short order, a whole bunch of people killed e-mail. Now, I have yet another problem. Instead of being blocked by people after the fact, I'm blocked by people up front. More than once, I've had this conversation now: "You have your e-mail blocked." "Oh, sorry, let me turn it off... Okay send it now." "No, you still have it blocked." "What? I set it to... Oh, wait a minute, here it is..." *sigh...*

In short, what used to be a valuable communication tool is pretty much dead now, except to send stuff to your alts. I've virtually completely stopped using what used to be a handy communication and reference tool.

And because someone always brings it up, no, global tells are not an acceptable substitute. For one thing, global tells are really, really short. For another, global tells are ephemeral, so they don't make a good place to hang onto stuff for reference. (And as a side note, this crazy 20 e-mail limit they've imposed makes hanging onto e-mails for reference a non-option.) For yet another, for us RPers out here, I'd rather send an e-mail to Dude Supremico than @Vile Death Slayer. Probably not the most important of reasons, but there you go. For yet another, I have had on many occasions global tells completely ignored because someone was in the middle of battle or, worst of all, away from the keyboard and had no clue that someone sent them a tell. I could go on, but the point is that e-mail != g-tell, and at this point, e-mail being useless has become a self-fulfilling prophecy because the original issue--spam--wasn't addressed in the correct manner.

Some constructive answers to the spam problem, which I still maintain today would be just as effective on the forums and in local channels where I'm seeing it today, are:

• Make it stupidly quick and easy for GMs and moderators to ban accounts. It really should be just a matter of a "Ban Spammer" button. If some sort of review has to be done, then move the account to a "Temporary Ban" state pending official review of whether the ban was justified or not. Obviously, this also means holding GMs and moderators responsible for accidental or unreasonable bans, but the point is, they shouldn't have to type in special commands or otherwise do a lot of work. It should be quick and painless to ban someone.
• Set up automated tools so that if x number of people report player y in z minutes, a GM/moderator is summoned to investigate immediately. There should always be a GM/moderator on shift who can respond to such summons, as this means that a large number of people are being affected.
• Set up honeypots. I still think this is one of the best unimplemented ideas ever. In game, this would be "fake" characters that show up in search lists. It would actually be a moderator seeing all tells to the character. If someone sends a tell saying something like, "Hey, want to join a lvl 30 team?", the GM simply ignores the tell. If the tell says, "1 billion inf for $15," the GM clicks his or her This Is A Spammer button and a minute or two later (to not give away the character), *poof!* goes the account.
• Set up heuristics to try to detect spam. Here's a simple example. Every message that gets sent is put through a regular expression filter for /*\.\s*c\s*[o0]\s*m/i. If it matches, put it through another regular expression filter containing entries for known "good" sites such as cohtitan.com, paragonwiki.com, vidiotmaps.com, cityofheroes.com (obviously), photobucket.com, guildportal.com, etc. If it doesn't match the latter, automatically bounce a copy to a GM kind of how the honeypot messages are bounced and give them the opportunity to ban the account on the spot. There are ways to do this on the forums, too, using a blacklist of known RMT sites.

There are other ideas, but I don't want to write a book about the subject here. Point is, there are lots of ways to handle the problem. The path they chose was easy, but it rendered a feature of the game virtually useless.

Actually, this does sort of irritate me. I was in the camp of people who never really minded blind invites. I'd simply turn them down if I wasn't in the mood, or (gasp!) accept them if I wanted to team. If someone sent more than one, I'd send them a tell and let them know I didn't want to join. I never was in a situation where I kept getting them repeatedly, but if I did, I would have petitioned the person for harassment.

On the flip side, though, I can't tell you how many times I've had this conversation: "Hey, can I join your team?" "Sure..." *click, click, typity type type... sigh...* "You're not accepting invites." "Oh, sorry... Okay, try now!" *click, click, typity type type...*

It's not a major annoyance, but once they implemented the feature, the whole purpose and mechanics of teaming wasn't destroyed. And blind invites were never on such a level of irritation that once the feature was implemented, virtually everyone set their status to "Not Looking."

One other difference, and I might be wrong about this, so feel free to correct me if so because I'm not in a place where I can check this right now (as if someone wouldn't ), but if I'm not mistaken, every time you log out and log back on, the "looking for..." status is set back to its default, so you can't unintentionally get stuck on "Not Looking."

It's supposed to. It doesn't, not reliably. I have multiple times had my flag look like it's set to "not looking" (default) but "not accepting" (red text, auto-decline) has stealthily carried over from my last character/from my last login.

Of course, once they implemented the new /hide functions, I basically never have to set to "not accepting". /hidesearch is *so* my friend.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

So... by that line of thought, Spam Filters gimp E-mail programs like Outlook, and the ability to disable receiving PM's means the forums are gimped.

I think he's saying that everything that has been given to the players that allows them to reduce the amount of crap they have to put up with and have a happier gaming experience is bad for the game.

This is exactly why I keep the email unfiltered. I see the attachment tool as a great feature, and have used it to provide gifts to new and returning players.

In one situation, I couldn't just offer a trade invite, because I had to switch to a character with the funds, and by the time I made it back, the target player was on a new team in a mission.

In another, the person had to go and logged very quickly before I could get in range to trade with them.

Thank you, Champion.

Global mail circumvents the filter. It's only character->character mail that gets filtered. Global->global mail gets through no matter what the filter's set at.

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

Yes, that's exactly what I was saying. The more things that can make us miserable, the better. *sigh...* Why do people say things like this?

Of course not. But this has been presented as a false dichotomy. We either need the ability to restrict e-mail or we will have to put up with spam. There are more options than just those two.

In the real world, a lot of e-mail systems will let you configure a whitelist. The actual number of people who do is virtually nil. Do you have an e-mail whitelist? I know I don't, I never have, and I probably won't. In the real world, we've also had to put up with spam. I know I used to get really frustrated with having to constantly delete crap messages. Then in the real world, we had something nifty happen that forwent the need for using whitelists: spam filters. With this "happy medium" third option, we still got spam now and then.

In fact, we still do. But most people (all normal people I know) don't shut themselves off to everyone but a select group of friends when it comes to e-mail. In fact, Gmail's spam filter is so good, I pretty much advertise mine publicly all the time. (tonyv@cohtitan.com, or I think the old tonyv@paragonwiki.com still forwards correctly, too, in case anyone gets bored and wants to say hi.)

Anyway, my point is, the solution implemented isn't the same one that the world accepted for real life e-mail, because it was deemed too inconvenient by most people. (And they're right.) Can you imagine what a pain it would be if, before you ever send anyone an e-mail, you had to ask them to whitelist you? E-mail would be severely hampered as a viable communications medium. Yet that's the exact situation we face here, and it's not even the world at large that we're talking about. We're talking about a relatively small community of City of Heroes players who share at least that common interest.

A good spam filter would be nice. If they could contract the guy who developed Google's spam filter, that would be awesome. It would probably also be moderately expensive. That's why I've proposed the combination of using simple filters that could be relatively easily rolled out, along with heightened monitoring and simplified tools to make monitoring more efficient.

I'm all for reducing the amount of crap we have to put up with. I don't want anyone to be miserable. I just don't like that our e-mail system is now virtually useless*, especially when I feel like it is needlessly so and the problem could have been resolved in another way that left the feature intact.

*As a communications tool to others, that is--the purpose for which it was originally designed. As a transfer mechanism for stuff, it works well. I'm not knocking the functionality that was added to it.

Ah, nice. I'm glad to see my guess was inaccurate in this case...back to resetting my email!!