About four days ago we had a certain individual (Trapavelli McQueen) begin spamming help chat. Or more precisely, a large number of 1-day old characters spamming Hypernet offers owned by Trapavelli McQueen. It appears this individual realized a loophole: By using multiple characters, he can circumvent attempts to block him, circumvent the channel’s flood detection, and delay or evade CCP retribution.
I personally reported five separate accounts, across at least four days, and there are probably even more which spammed when I wasn’t online at the time. But CCP was slow enough to act that he was still able to post literally hundreds of adverts in the help channel over a few days. And during this time the help channel was crippled; the ratio of advertising to actual human conversation was 4:1 in terms of volume of text.
If we block alpha accounts from linking hypernet offers, it could stop the abuse of alpha accounts for advertising. Or if that’s considered too overreaching, even smaller steps like only allowing alphas to link their own hypernet offers, or only letting them link X offers per minute in chat would be a major decrease for potential abuse.
I would recommend joining a help channel and examining the MOTD before throwing out unfounded accusations.
Advertising is prohibited in help channels by CCP mandate. And probably for good reason; rookies are forced to join rookie help their first 30 days (unless that’s changed since I first joined EVE), not to mention frequently must visit it to learn about the game, so these channels represent a possibly larger audience than even Jita local. If not for the ban on advertising, spamming would be even more intense there and render the help channel unusable.
Yes, and normally they are timely. 95% of spammers that I have reported in the past are gone within a day, and do not return. However, by using separate accounts, it appears this individual managed to get away with spamming the channel for the better half of a week before he was finally stopped. CCP acted drastically slower in this case, which I suspect is related to the use of multiple separate accounts to obfuscate the perpetrator.
In any case, I just made this suggestion because it seemed to me the disadvantages of doing so were heavily outweighed by the advantages of doing so. I suspect there are extremely few instances in which an alpha account legitimately needs to link hypernet links – particularly a large number of them per minute.
I missed the part about it being official help channels. My bad.
There’s been so much whining and crying about the Hypernet I just skipped over that part when reading your post.
This won’t solve OP’s problem, but why not allow a person to create only one hypernet offer, and only if they are in omega state? That would reduce the hypernet spam by a large amount. At worst, introduce a skill to allow one hypernet offer per skill level (no limit on how many offers you can bid of course).