Spam Sentry

[Sinbad]

I know everyone hates to hear comparisons between EQ2 and WoW, but IMO they are both good games and both have good AND bad traits. Most importantly, they both share a lot of common problems.

One problem that both games share is spammers. Generally spammer-botsfrom the frauds who want to steal our money by selling game gold or power leveling services or some other item or service that is definitely unethical and is likely to get us banned. [If you disagree with me about whether those people are frauds, whether frauds are thieves, or whether it is unethical to do any of these things, please leave it for another thread.]

One of the modders for WoW developed a mod called Spam Sentry. That mod was SO effective that the flood of reports it generated by trapping tells from the spammers and automating the reporting process actually prodded Blizzard into changing their system. Now, it only requires a right-click on a spammer's name to report them, AND it does not generate a ticket, so you can report spammers as often as they happen, BUT they also FINALLY put a filter in to block those bot-generated names so that there are very few spammers sending messages. They finally made it hard for the spammers to create those bot-players to send their spam messages without investing more money into the programming and accounts than it is worth! Maybe that's why I seem to get 2-5 spam messages on EQ2 every two minutes now?

I know this is a long-winded post, but I had to put all that in to make my request make sense. What I am wondering is - How hard would it be to duplicate what was done for WoW and create a Spam Sentry for EQ2?

If it could be done, it would certainly make a lot of players happier! Not only that, but it might finally prompt SOE to go ahead and concentrate on FIXING a problem instead of ignoring it as long as possible. Flooding them with reports on spammers will definitely get it across that this really IS a serious problem AND give them documentation to DO something about it. The biggest problem up till now has been that it has been a royal pain to make those reports and the spammers are flooding out the channels you need to type in half the time.

In fact, I have noticed that a lot of players seem to be holding their conversations in the OOC channel to avoid using the Tell channel. Perhaps because they have the Tell channel turned Off as a crude way to block the spammers? [Yes, I know that some of them are just ignorant of proper etiquette.]