Originally Posted by gspence

You're right, blocking IP's really doesn't help. If someone is going through an ISP, that IP might be assigned to a plat farmer one day, and assigned to a valid customer the next day.

/report sends LOTS of text, not sure how many lines, but I wouldn't be surprised if its 100. I've seen the output, and its a lot.

Adding names to a wordlist isnt really a good solution either because plat sellers will change domains and fake the wordlist as fast as we could add names to it. Plus, imagine how much overhead it would take if we had to search a huge wordlist everytime someone sent a chat message. Talk about adding to the lag! I'm sure no one wants that.

One idea is to keep track of each unique person that someone sends a tell to and if they go over a certain number automatically squelch them for a period of time. Unfortunately this doesnt stop them from sending messages, it just slows them down or causes them to create more accounts. Also, its possible that valid users would get squelched if they were sending legitimate tells to lots of people.

Having people get auto-banned after X number of reports has griefing written all over it. I can just see a guild deciding they don't like someone, so they get all of their members to simultaneously report someone.

This is a tough problem with no easy answer and thus the reason why nothing better is in place at the moment. I assure you if an idea comes up that solves the problem, one of us will jump on it right away.

Continue to /report those spammers because they are getting banned daily. They tend to use the same character name over and over so it has the side effect of looking like we haven't done anything about it but I can assure you this isn't the case.

Thanks,
Greg