Anyone who has spent time in Jita knows what a cesspool it has become of endless spam posts for scams, hypernet auctions, etc. Even if you have a block list of the many thousands of players who post this crap incessantly via bots, there is still stuff that leaks through even with extensive maintenance of block lists. Additionally, such posts show up in local chat in other systems and in NPC corp chats.
If you go back a few years the above situation was never as bad as it is now. EVE is a social game, and the pollution of local chat negatively impacts the broader player community, especially the experience of new players. Those that have played the game long may remember a time when CCP staff members sometimes showed up in local at trade hubs like Jita to interact with players. This would be impossible/useless in the current environment without extremely large and current block lists for both CCP staff and any players in local interested in participating.
While there is no panacea to these problems (especially since CCP seems unwilling or unable to completely ban chat bots), I believe it would be possible to reduce the impact on the player game experience if some chat filtering options were introduced beyond blocking individual players. Toward this end I propose adding the following player options for filtering the content they see in local, corp, or other chat forums on a per-channel basis:
Filter out any post containing a contract reference
Filter out any post containing a hypernet auction reference
Filter out any post containing a URL reference
There may be one or two other categories that could be added to filtering options, but this should be enough to illustrate the idea. Since the options would be player-selected and on a per channel basis, they would not impact conversations where the player does not want or need such filtering.
The computational load of such filtering should be negligible and would be handled entirely on the game client, not the server. It would not shut down all spam, but it would help a great deal and likely reduce the amount a player sees by 90-95%. Moreover, this would generate benefits instantly without having to first build block lists of 5000-20000 players. This would help a great deal when playing alts since block lists cannot currently be shared, copied, merged, etc.
I urge CCP to strongly consider this idea and help salvage and restore the ability to have sensible conversations with other players in Local at trade hubs like Jita and reduce the amount of chat pollution that the broader EVE community must experience in public chat channels throughout the game.
Very much supported. I would already be happy if Hypernet links were bright pink instead of orange to show what kind of kink crap people link in local and to make it easier to block these chars without having to check customized links.
Do the people here block any hypernet poster they see?
I sometimes post hypernets in local, but never any less than 20 minutes apart. Does this get me blocked to some people?
Do you want to win easy billions of ISK? Check my bio to find out more!
Jita local is already full of it, and would still be full of it after your proposed suggestion. No url, no contract, no hyperlink and still visible to everyone with your spam filter on.
I personally block every player that posts hypernets; no exceptions. I think it’s a bad feature in the game, and it greatly increased the amount of spam in Jita after it was introduced. The amount of time I’ve had to invest in maintaining block lists increased by 2x to 3x after hypernet auctions were added.
My opinion is that a lot of scammers switched over to hypernet auctions as they are essentially a scam-oriented feature. Con players into effectively grossly overpaying for items since their odds of winning are quite a bit lower than the raffle costs. You may get lucky a few times, but eventually players will grossly overpay for items the more often they participate.
The chat-filtering options I’m proposing will not block all spam, but they will stop a very large percentage of it. Most of the spam that appears in the game contains either a contract reference, a hypernet auction reference, or a URL.
A clever spammer can try to work around such filters, but it would greatly reduce the value of the post, making it pointless. There is no good substitute for either a contract or hypernet reference, and tricks to spell out a web address that would not be caught by a URL filter impose too much of a burden on the player seeing the post for it to be a useful way to get them to follow up; there’s no easy link to copy / click on.
Just because not all spam would be caught by the proposed feature is not a reason to not add it. An 80-95% solution is much better than nothing at all, and it would provide another tool beyond highly-time-intensive maintenance of player block lists.