Rookie Help would be better if it had 3 types of filtering:
- Spam filter
Sometimes someone will spam nonsense, such as a single letter, or repeat the same word again and again (often sometime offensive, but not always), eg:
Spammer > r
Spammer > r
Spammer > r
Spammer > r
This could be automatically filtered out by not letting the player repeat the same input.
There are several ways to do this:
a. check any message against the one before, and filter it if it’s exactly the same (although this would also catch several people saying “OK” or “o7”
b. check what the player types against their previous line (although that would catch people asking the same question again as they didn’t get a reply)
c. check against any previous lines within, say, 5 seconds.
- WASD filter
Some players, coming from WASD controlled games, seem to be unaware that typing a string of WASD characters then pressing return isn’t going to help, eg
GameBoy > wadsadwasssaaaadddwssadwas
This should be easy to check for and filter.
- Contract / hypernet link filter
These aren’t allowed in Rookie Chat, so simply filter any message containing those types of links, or turn those links into stars ********