Jita local is completely unusable and has been forever. Local chat across New Eden is continuously spammed with the “Free 1M Skillpoint” links. Most players get irritated every time a Hypernet ad is posted for the 43rd time in an hour. ISK beggars abound. And although I personally sell a ton of contracts, I get that there are plenty of people that don’t want to see my posts.
As scammers and spammers have access to unlimited accounts. And there really is no way to block them all, they will just create a new account. Scammers gonna scam, and spammers gonna spam. I’ve got a few ideas to fix it all. The second and third ideas need some discussion, though I personally think the ideas are good, I don’t know what the parameters need to be.
In the channel option dropdown list, add 3 options: “Toggle Disable/Enable Hypernet Links”, “Toggle Disable/Enable Contract Links”, and “Toggle Disable/Enable Outside Internet Links”.
A “Report” option, similar to the “Report Bot” option automatically triggers a suspended account pending review from CCP for scamming. The trigger is a certain quantity of reports from the community (How many?) - Probably a bad idea. Read Below.
Place an ISK value/price on posts in LOCAL chat. After a given amount of posts in LOCAL, it costs a nominal amount of ISK to continue posting. A certain amount of posts are free, and after that, it costs you to post more. - Possibly a bad idea. Read Below
All the links go away if you don’t want to see them, but you can change your position at will, at any time. Most people do all their chatting in private or fleet channels, so the local chat shouldn’t be affected much. Anyone posting prolifically in Local (How many posts?) is either a scammer or won’t mind paying a given amount of ISK (How much is reasonable?) to continue posting. The idea is to break the spammer’s wallet for spamming but preserve a reasonable quantity of posts that the average player would actually use in Local chat and never even notice. None of this should apply to Private or Fleet chats of course.
Upvote, and post feedback and suggestions. Help fix local, and decrease the constant flow of BS.
Edit: Imagine Jita Local with no Hypernet, Contract, or Skill Point Links.
Edit 2: Ideas 2 and 3 may not be such good ideas.
I’ve blocked these spammers for days, they literally just continue to cycle through new accounts so you can never block the spam, it has to be a bot play cause I can’t see someone spamming all day everyday without end, yet this has been going on forever and why CCP won’t kill it must be some reason must want to keep it.
And it won’t ever stop really. But the links seem to be the primary tool that they use. If we can block the tools, then we can block the person. All we can do is minimize the impact.
you just have not blocked enough characters. After a few thousand it becomes noticeably quieter. I’m at nearly 4k blocked chars and you notice the difference.
I do like that. However, I would rather it be specifically repeat links, (for hypers and contracts) because I think that legitimate trade can happen through Jita local, and even the spammed contracts are worth looking at sometimes. As long as the same 5 people aren’t fiilling your chat, they can reach the same number of players without destroying local chat. Overall, great original idea.
While I see the idea behind this, there are just too many ways to abuse this that I can see. Like Dark Lord’s comment, opposing alliance leadership would have to be constantly “investigated”. In addition, the more work CCP puts into reading scam/spam reports, the less new content gets released.
For someone who talks to FW people in local all the time, from simple "gf"s to full on battle breakdowns, I would truly hate this change.
I don’t have a citation for this, but I am pretty sure people would VERY MUCH MIND having to “pay 2 say”.
It would be full of trolling, two dozen simultaneous small conversations, and a lot of text with very bland colors.
I do some advertizing in local chats in trade hubs, mostly hypernets and looking for price offers for certain modules I have (like Setele’s Modified Large Armor Repairer, WTS ). This means I have a definite ulterior motive to having only the messages with repeat links removed. With this in mind, this may change how you receive my response, and I thought it only fair that you know the whole story.
I do a lot of contract advertising in local chat too. I don’t want that to go away, as it’s responsible for a large part of my income. I do think that there is a reasonable limit to how much advertising becomes obnoxious spam though. I think that having the option to temporarily just turn it off and filter the congestion would be a nice option.
I personally would be fine if I never saw another Hypernet Link ever again. Unless the contract ads were getting ridiculous, I would leave them up. Certain outside links I would like to see…sometimes. So for those, I would probably switch them on and off frequently depending on where I was.
I’m not advocating blocking everything, only to offer the ability to filter the incoming garbage.
All that is needed is a spam protection, I had to code it on my multiplayer server too due to immersion breaking issues of constant shouting (fantasy RPG game) it is very easy to do and very effective
There are various methods to do this, either temp ban posting if the user sends multiple messages in short timeframe or simply block any message that is same as was last sent message until 6seconds passes out.
As for refer a friend link spamming, that can be fixed easily by removing the rewards for the referrer for older accounts activating it retroactively, or just remove it completely (except the omega time if that account subs). Many of us, including me, didn’t get the booster anyway due to some bug or what so what is the problem.
The way I see this could work is to either a) optionally not show on client side messages with links that have already been posted, like, within 1 hour (because database for all-time history would get out of control eventually, among other reasons), which is reasonably long. Maybe make it an adjustable setting?
Anyway, b) is to put a hard limit on repeating links upon posting a message, possibly even on sender’s client side to save server resources. Not adjustable in this case, and it’d be not that fair to be way beyond 15 minutes IMO. Also, this can be bypassed through alts.
In general, I believe version A to be a more fair one, not affecting anyone’s gameplay too much except people with local in a separate window and always visible (like myself), and neither version is hard to implement technically
Reading through this again, and I suspect there might be some misunderstanding with my original idea. The “toggle on/off” functions wouldn’t stop anyone from posting anything, it would just stop it from showing up in my chat window. Imagine a broad spectrum Ignore option.
Take a look at the chat window, using the option to “Disable Light Background”. Same thing, except for options to disable Hypernet/Contracts/Links.
I have found a problem with my previous “don’t show messages with repeat links” option. Since the hypernet window, bio link window, and contract window are all variations on the “show info” command, wouldn’t player names also count? That means people would not be able to see any more than one personalized reply due to dragged names being repeat links.
). This means I have a definite ulterior motive to having only the messages with repeat links removed. With this in mind, this may change how you receive my response, and I thought it only fair that you know the whole story.