Thunderfury spam

[Zorak]

If Thunderfury spam you will,
You'll rise by normal players urge to kill.
And once someone "enough" will say,
Than all you can do will be to pray.
They call GM, you can bet,
Only BAN you really deserve to get.


This my little poem was just a small friendly nudge I was posting everytime a massive thinderfury spam came out.

Well, and as everwhere it is, those clever ones gets it, those stupid don't. And sadly, there is a majority of the stupid ones as it seems to be.
So I say that "enough".

So following words will not be as kind.
I would like to ask the GM team to stop it.
From my point of view, this is clearly a violation of acceptable behavior on global channels and there should be a punnishment.
You spam? You break the rules? You get punnishment. Period. As that simple it is.

But,how to achieve this?
I definitely get, that GM cannot be online 24/7 on watch for violations.
That's where system support comes into the play.

I believe, you are working with highly customized core and you are not dependant on basic releases of Mangos/TrinityCore/Whatever other core, so one more change is ok, maintainable and possibly extendable

I am suggesting simple buffer mechanism to watch out on those spammers.

1) for each PUBLIC/GLOBAL (this is important, we don't want to affect private channels, raid channels, partys and so on...) channel, there will be a separate instance of this mechanism.
2) This mechanism will consists of simple timer and simple message buffer.
3) This mechanism reads output stream of messages (what server sends to other players) - only reads, does not affect them.
4) When a message with Thunderfury item CLINK is posted, it is coppied into the message buffer.
5) When first message copied, 1 minute timer will start ticking.
6) This mechanism will continue gathering messgaes with linked thunderfury.
7) When timer ends, we check the content of buffer. There has to be some trusthold set, I believe 5 thunderfury per mminute starts to be SPAM.
8) So if the buffer contains 5 and more messages with thunderfury link collected for that minute, get users who sent them and MUTE them for eternity (or couple of hours, your choice). If the buffer contains more than 5 messages (this is regular linking in game with ho intent of spamming), nothing will happen.
9) Clear the buffer, reset timer, start reading channel again for next first occasion of thunderfury link.



Simple, effective.
Oh, and you can ask, what if one normal player will link thunderfury for some real reason and other kids start spamming and he gets the mute too?
Well, he can visit those kids at home with baseball bat, I really don't care. Sacrificing one person for comunitys good seems fair to me. Anyway there will not be many cases like that, because people will by this method learn very fast to not spam. The original poster can also appeal. If you want to backup those buffers to determine, if the first linker should be unmuted, its up to you.




And maybe for those team members, which may think this is just occasional and is not a problem...:



This is how the chat looks like several times A DAY!
Please, make some countermeasures. Because poems does not work.

Cheers.

[vicezx]

that wont happen because the Thunderfury spam is a meme/joke as old as vanilla wow, search for it if you want and u will see how many images of thunderfury spam you will see in retail. blizzard even recognized it and made an official achievement out of it https://goo.gl/9d1ENW

You are basically asking devs to reprimend players for following a wow meme that has been a thing for more than 10 years. Like if i suddenly go to a disney park, see people dressed like disney characters, then go to a different disney park, and ask the owners to reprimend those that dress like characters because they scare kids. If Blizzard, the developers behind the game, didnt mind about it, why should Freakz? just turn off global chat and turn if back on later if it really anoys you so much, its not like you can read the chat normally when its happening so whats the difference

[Zorak]

Your argument is invalid.

See the official rules:
https://forum.wow-freakz.com/Rules-and-Regulations-t58312.html

Any of the following actions will result in a temporary/permanent mute of your in-game account:
To spam excessively;
To create characters/guilds with obscene names or use such language, no matter the chat channel or if it's for a player or not; [Inappropiate language-related rules are applied only on global chat.]
To try to make any joke with a GameMaster from which he might be actually offended or only feel any offense;
To swear at anything related to the server or the server itself (rollbacks, restarts, scripts, site, forum, etc);
To use the .gmn command for anything else except reporting cheaters;
Spamming (especially vulgar/items spamming)
To use colors on public channels (using scripts, addons, hacks, etc).



Clear, simple, rooted in rules. Meme or not, 10 yers old or 1000 yers old, it IS spamming, it IS excessive (one spam like that for minutes, several times a day) and it IS item spamming.

Only thing I am asking is to actually enforce following existing rules.

Or it is OK to start hacking? Or it is ok to start botting? Or it is ok to start insulting everyone ... well why not? Why one thing is being punnished and other not? Shouldn't be there the same approach to every forbidden thing?

[ripz]

The GMs do mute people for it. As you said GMs aren't online all the time to prevent it, which is unfortunate. However, wanting the devs to create a system that automatically monitors the amount of thunderfury spam in chat is .... Well I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or not.

Realistically there's only a handful of people spamming it when the spam does occur. For example, look at your own screenshot. It's the same people over and over again with the odd random person throwing in their own thunderfury once or twice.

There's this handy thing called an ignore list. It's kind of like what you wanted to be added to the game, except it's already in the game. It works great against preventing spam such as this.


Also, of course it's not OK to start hacking etc. That comparison is completely blown of out proportion. You can't compare some people linking an item in chat to someone hacking. Yes, they're both against the "rules" but that doesn't make them equal.
That's like trying to compare stealing some candies at a small store as opposed to murder. Are you going to sentence them both to jail? They're both against the "rules"(law). No, of course not. It's just not the same and you can't compare them.



tl;dr GMs do mute people for TF spam. If you don't think they do a good enough job then use your ignore list.

[vicezx]

Like ripz said, its only spaming if its the same person over and over, in your screenshot yes, there are a few people linking tf several times, thats spaming, however if say, i link the item once, and then a hundreed different people start to link it too, but only once or 2 per person, as spammy as it looks none of those thousand person as technically spaming because they each only linked the item once or twice. more than that it does becomes spam.

i think the most devs can do about it its maybe make a system that temporary automatically mutes people for x time if it detects that they linked the same item (any item, doesnt necesarily needs to be only TF) x amount of times in a relatively short amount of time, say, same item linked 3-4 times per minute in the same chat cause the person to recieve a 5-10 minute mute in said chat.

[Zorak]

I disagree.

it IS spam and it does not matter, that it is collective spam. Item is clearly linked to actually create this spam. To hook other players into this.

add Ignore list:
It is not such as few people. This screen is only from one occasion. Want more? I will add when I collect.
Also, I really dont want to click into ignore 20 people each time, which is also bad in a way, because it will make trouble, if you meet them in dungeons/raids and so on.

And by your words of crime - Imagine you are owner of the store and few people do the shoplifting. You WILL call the cops on them. You won't just turn your back to not see as they do the shoplifting. If I use the ignore list, I will just turn my back, but the shoplifting will be still there, spreading as shoplifters recruit more shoplifters because they know they can steal freely. And not only from you, but from other stores too. - if you get the analogy. Using ignore list simply will not get us rid of bad behavior and there will olways be some other new spammer, who we need to manually add to ignore list.



add crime comparsion:
I do not want to have the same punishment for spammers. I want to have same approach. That means, if I use your words, one man commits murder, one do some shoplifting. One ends with 25 years in prison, one leaves with fine or publicly beneficial works. But both gets the punishment according to their crime.