Maybe give us an in game centralized location to post our links instead, to focus the attention of the spammers there instead of ruining chat channels rookies use to learn your game.
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Potential solutions provided by the conversation from the thread:
Chat and Email filters.
Text strings
Links of various types
Default filters should filter out common spam
Remove or limit the invite reward.
Limit the time the reward is active.
CSPA charge for posting spam links in game for everyone who can see it.
Remove the ability for Alphas to give out the link.
Bannable offense to spam recruitment link in certain channels.
Report referral link spammer option
Rookie channels off limits
Make one Rookie corp and have it ISD chat moderated to keep out spam.
Make official spam channel, all other channels are off limits
Ban referral links completely in game, restrict to a section of the forum
Have options/tickboxes for each channel you’re part of where you can toggle seeing external links, hypernets, contracts. One channel you might want to see contracts but not in others and you might want to see Hypernets or not at all.
Yeah, solid plan, but that wouldn’t help unless the public channels and npc corps were defaulted to blocking those things. I’m not even complaining for my own sake here, I can block them easily enough. Those rookie corp channels used to be buzzing with activity of new players, and now it’s primarily spammers. This isn’t a good look for the game, and it’s ruining the on boarding process.
If they’re not default, it wont have the desired impact. I would venture a sizeable portion of players see that wall of spam, get reminded of gold sellers in other games, get annoyed, then log off never to return.
It wont be until much later that they’d have need of the link posting, and when they try to post a link… the chat window could blink… and put a help box around the toggle letting the player know about the setting.
I prefer to think that people have agency, including newbies, and that they can make their own choices. Perhaps they’re actually happy someone spammed the link for them to use, if only for the first spammer
It’s the same with contracts and hypernet, people can learn about these things (possibly the hard way) and then be given the choice to disable it or not.
That’s why one of the first things I do with any ‘noob’ character is either create my own corp or join a small one that I own myself. Creating a corp is literally a few minutes job…couple of minutes training…even for an Alpha.
I mean, yes, all the ’ free 1m SP’ spamming has gotten out of hand. Not just in corp chat but there are numerous people who fly all the way from Jita to Amarr spamming such links in every system in shuttles. If I had the patience I’d hang around and smart bomb them all.
This recruitment spam is a horrible first impression for new players, full stop.
Rather than adding in some option to disable hyperlinks in chat, CCP needs to step up and make a rule that spamming public or rookie-corp chat channels with referral links is no longer allowed.
Putting the onus on new players to block the dozens and dozens and dozens of referral spammers is the worst “solution” I’ve yet seen suggested to address this problem.
There should be a general setting where you can select the default options that should apply for all channels, and indidvidual setting options for each channel in case you want to override the defaults for this specific channel.
If one of the selected options is detected in a message, the whole message isn’t shown.
Must have includes are:
block external URLs
block contract links
block hypernet links
block channel links
Not going to solve it because people will simply do it on omega account and that is if they weren’t already because they are running 5+ accounts at the same time and this is simply a fresh alt.
Personally I’d love to see a clientside “do not show me any message containing these substrings” list but until then it’s literally two clicks to block, thats not a high cost
Oh… You’re one of those guys. It’s all or nothing. Black or white with no room for gray.
Log into the game with more than one character sometime and see how many scumbags are running 12 alpha alts with a bot scrolling through them over and over all day. Or just logging in and out manually through all the NPC corps over and over and over.
Don’t Tackle 1 in that screenie in the OP for example goes up to Don’t Tackle 15. And he’s been banned at least five times before with other alpha groups.
So… no Aisha, banning alpha external linking won’t solve the problem. But it’ll be a start. A ■■■■■■■ great start in my opinion.
It will not solve it because there is an incentive for these people to do it and since there’s no reason to use an alpha specifically in the first place it’s not going to affect much at all. Sure it’ll help like 5% or so but that’s a waste of effort and you won’t even notice it.
The only thing it’ll do it make it impossible for newbies, or older alpha players, to link things like workbench fits, the wiki, youtube guides or anything similar.
Yeah, this has gotten really bad. I’ve seen it ramping up and just destroying the chat in the NPC corps. I have a few characters in NPC corps and it’s a drastic change from even a couple of years ago.
And the characters are blatantly named just to get around people’s blocking. You’ll have like “EveReferral_1” post and then 10 seconds later, “EveReferral_2” post. Give it an hour and you’ll see it go through double digits. The mass majority of them are also under 30 days, and quite a few are under 2 weeks. Hell, a lot of the time the characters are 1 and 2 days old.
On top of that, some of the messages are taking up 1-2 scrolls of the window, they’re that long. Look at this for example:
The top one is clearly designed to take up far more than most people have their chat window sized. The second picture is two posts made within minutes of each other. It’s the same person, switching alts and just spamming.
When you have new players, who are just getting to grips with the UI as a whole, who have their questions interrupted by these massive posts… it’s not a good look for the game. Every time this happens I see the chat just die off, and it’s quiet enough as it is because of the incessant spam.
Honestly what´s next allowing gold sellers ? Honestly this is equally bad as seeing gold spammers in other mmo games.
Even if this is a good thing for new players. This link is mend for you to spam your own social media. And I should have to block people, People should have some fracking decency not to spam like a bot.
