First of all, apologies for creating a new thread for this but this has been annoying me for a long time now. So many people on this forum think it's impossible to automatically block gold sellers as it would be 'to hard to code' or that it 'would take too much time to adjust the filters to keep up with the new gold spam messages' so I took it upon myself to prove them all wrong. I am not able to delete the old thread so please just let that one die. I've written a simple gold seller detection script (using only 33 keywords) that will automatically detect gold spam seller messages (and any new variety they can come up with). I have only tested it for about 15 minutes but I'm pretty confident that it will remove 99% of all gold spammers automatically (even with any new flavor they can come up with). Time invested: 10 minutes on Youtube to gather/analyze gold spam messages (thanks for the feedback on the previous thread! /s) 30 minutes to create the sheet 5 minutes to tweak the keywords 15 minutes to test You can test it yourself by going here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...bLSVXOiLdv7uk5FCt88MyCNGdc/edit#gid=920503452 Fill in the gold spammer message of your choice in cell A2 (or try any variety you can come up with) and press Enter. The sheet will tell you if you're a gold spammer or not. I think this is pretty fool proof now but to be 100% certain an additional check could be build in that would only ban players on the 3rd message that was categorized as being a gold spam message. Updating the keywords would only take about 30 seconds (and probably has to be done only once a week since the script will detect most new flavors automatically).
I don't think it's so easy, maybe with some tweeks, i just don't think it's their top priority atm, there are many issues with banning words.
yeah you better be sorry. The dead horse you are kicking, it has had enough. It's dead. you can't get rid of gold sellers in a free to play game. welcome to what every free to play mmo on pc deals with every day for the last 20 years. I'm sorry your peaceful play time is interupted by annoying gold sellers, man up, put em on ignore and move on with your life. You will sleep better at night.
While I admire your determination, and the work you put into this is pretty impressive, 9/10 it's already been tried at some point by someone in another MMO. Gold sellers are common among many games, if they were easy to get rid of, many would have done it by now.
Thanks for testing, I've made some tweaks to it now based on your screenshots which should make the detection a lot better. The normal approach would be to get a big data set first and do extensive testing and not try to put this together within less than 1 hour and a minimum amount of testing of course. But my whole point was just to prove that it's not mission impossible to implement this, even though some people still seem to disagree with me although the evidence is right there in front of them.
I don't think anyone has denied you can create a filter to grab certain text strings. Once you get a false positive, that's at least a customer support ticket or angry forum post, if not a lost customer. A rep will have to review the case, make a determination, undo the ban...this all costs money. Start multiplying that by how many ever false positives you get, and it gets to the point where it isn't worth it VERY quickly. In the long run, most businesses that run MMOs have done the cost-benefit analysis and made the same conclusion.
I get your point and I fully agree with it but I'm not just grabbing certain strings. It's a combination of checking for multiple keywords & cleaning up the original text (and no, this won't have an effect on the game performance, it's pretty much the same idea as the existing filter system). False positives are a big no-no I agree. So you can just target the actual gold sellers which I think I've done now. But again, you would only implement this by testing for several days; see which messages are caught before you release testing to production and tweak where needed. But try it yourself and let me know if anything you can come up with would be detected as gold spam which was actually a normal message.
gmail uses a combination of machine learning that gotten better with additional data of human users using the 'report spam' feature. Today, they have a box for 'spam' in such a way where if the rules aren't perfect and folks want to see the 'spam' messages they can still go there and read. The false positives are examples; but I would like to point out if a human is typing 'selling cheap' in my LFG, i rather these messages go to my 'spam tab'. Just saying. If different rules in trade chat, then sure. To the OP, if not for this game; but you're interested in computer science; look up some of the machine learning modules and programs that are free and in open source community. Some good stuff out there and don't even have to code them from scratch.
