A ponder on the bot solution
 

I was thinking... I wonder if using the word filters would help get rid of their advertising. Like.. block www. and .com stuff, and find each of the site names and block them. If not all, then just the main ones. Even block monetary signs. So they'd be like "Go to ******* for plvling and free silver! Only ***** for 100s and ***** for 1g!!!!!!!!! URL is *****" If they can't advertise, maybe they'll go away, lol. If you don't know the title of their sites, or the URL, you can't go there, and then they can't make money. I know you can't block their accounts, they'll just make new ones.. but its a small possible solution. Seems simple, so simple it won't work, but yeah.

That would be pretty nice.

Then this game would become alarmingly similar to RuneScape.

Never played it. But sheesh, if it gets rid of the bots.

Even still, in RuneScape it's very difficult to carry a conversation in unicode English, let alone in asterisk or some other language...

It's better simply to ban than have them there spamming anyways and not being able to communicate at all.

Maybe.. the GMs should just implement the spam filter. If you spam too much you disconnect. I mean, those n00bs-not newbies- that spam the general chat with 1s PLZ, over and over which is really annoying.

Does Fiesta ISP ban?

Probably not. Some people have dynamic IP's.

Like AOL users? D: their ISP numbers change frequently.

Yes, and SBC users as well.

I'm always assigned a new IP each time I turn my modem on. Same general region, but a new IP.

Censoring sounds like a good idea to me. Even though it seems obvious to not go to the site, I have had some new people who were playing asking me if it's real or not.

This seems to be one of the better suggestions about stopping gold farming site spam from other games. The only problem that I can think of if this method is used with a censor thats overzealous and starts affecting normal chat. Fiesta censor seems to be one of the better ones I've liked, as it only blocks out the word and not the whole sentence or have a popup saying you've entered vulgar language (Maplestory anyone?)

One further method that I think Runescape has against gold sellers is the tracking and auto banning (perhaps not..) of people who are giving huge amounts of gold to people for nothing in exchange. No idea how this well this works, if at all, since I no longer follow the scene there.

well its not like stuff like $ and www. and .com is used frequently in the game.

I think its a great idea! They could (probably would) just put "thepowerlevelDOTcom" or "_com" or other variations. You have to remember that they will always try, as long as they can make a buck. It might work though.

Er, they use macros. There is kindof a difference. >_>

They prolly would >_<I also got an idea from the server dying. DC them if they don't move. But then people wouldn't open over night vendors.. Or they could have preset times for the server to go down for a sec sparatically, so hey DC. If they're "bots" they might not have been set to auto log. I'm not 100% sure how those things work..

The problem with this suggestion is that the filter doesn't work like that. You'll notice how you can type let's say as a mild example, crapp, but not crap. You can also use any extension of the original word crap such as crappy, crappp, crapping, and so on and so forth. So if they game engine were to filter www. and .com, entering anything in between would allow it to pass through the filter. The filter in Fiesta only blocks specific words in a specific form, any deviation from the filtered form is allowed to pass through.

Your suggestion's great and all but Fiesta's filter just won't let it happen. Something needs to be done with the loose filter, which to me, is the heart of the advertising exploits.

Well basically, with the whole filter idea, of course, beef up the filter system. It definitely needs some editing. I see nothing wrong with saying "punk" or "butt" lol.

I like the idea. Don't think it would be very hard for them to do either. Also, I am not an expert by any means, but can't the system tell when there is a macro in use, or are they easy to hide. If they can tell, then they could have the system automatically ban any account that used a macro.

true story. i found out today that you cant say shit or fuck, but you can say shitfuck

Then maybe they should re-do the filters.

IP blockage is a start. Then, maybe they could lower the spam by invoking like a 10 sec delay between shouts.

wont it be more effective to block their domain name?? so u get www.*****.com

they can try alter their domain name.. but then that doesnt get us to their site! haha i doubt they'll move domain name to get around our filter...

Thats what I meant. Find the site names and filter them, it may not be ALL of them, but finding some of them would help reduce it. But yeah, there are ways around it. They could type www. l o l g o l d .com, or w w w . l o l g o l d . c o m.
I doubt they would chain their domain names for the filters.

Managed Character Delete and limit shouting
 

I think that the solution might be to simply delete characters (not block IPs, since we all know how much of a solution that can be). To prevent the making of new characters as shouting bots, restrict shouting to say, level 5 and above.

This way, a player would actually have to do a little work before it could become a shouter and deleting one of the shouting bots would actually have some effect, for a while at least.

Until the leveling bot got the shouting bot to level 5 and then it could shout. :confused:

There are bots that are levels 30+ ^^;;

hmm it isnt that hard to get to lvl 6... these site probably employs people to do that golf farming thing... tell them to spend 10 mins to lvl it up to lvl 6 isnt that hard..

but i guess targetting the problem is better than not doing anything at all!

make it hard for them!

Prolly the easiest way would be to have a /ignore (botofchoice) that way its player controlled and if you wanted to see it would be up to the player

Yeah.. theres a simple solution.. BLOCK THEM lol.

But like I said in the post before you requiem.. they have programs that auto play.. and there ARE bots that are lvl 30ish. Wouldn't stop them unfortunately.