WoW - Fighting back against the spammers

[Acanthus]

I am so sick of gold farmer spams that i have come up with an idea to put a stop to it.

If every player, every time they get a spam, gos to that website, loads every page on the website, and refreshes each one 10 times or so. Wouldnt it either:

a. run the site over bandwidth and bring it down.

b. cost them hundreds of $ in bandwidth.

Just a thought, im so tired of the spam.

 

[nsafreak]

Not unless your browser is configured not to fetch items from cache. Even at 10 times without fetching from cache getting website data doesn't use that much bandwidth. Your best bet would be to email Blizzard about it each time there's an occurence. Perhaps then they'll do something about that gold farmer.

 

[Schadenfroh]

It will not work.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: nsafreak
Not unless your browser is configured not to fetch items from cache. Even at 10 times without fetching from cache getting website data doesn't use that much bandwidth. Your best bet would be to email Blizzard about it each time there's an occurence. Perhaps then they'll do something about that gold farmer.

The gold farmers just create random chars which are then deleted.

It appears that blizzard does not ban accounts that spam.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
It will not work.

Got any better ideas?

Ive already done the "sign up every linked email on the site for thousands of spam emails" technique.

 

[CKent]

Get the SpamSentry addon, duh. I've never seen so many people (I read the WoW forums) get so worked up over something so easily taken care of.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: CKent
Get the SpamSentry addon, duh. I've never seen so many people (I read the WoW forums) get so worked up over something so easily taken care of.

What does it do?

People get irritated because its a game, we are supposed to be relaxing and having fun, not getting spammed with ads and getting scam crap in our mailbox.

I ran SLabs yesterday and got FIVE in an hour.

 

[CKent]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: CKent
Get the SpamSentry addon, duh. I've never seen so many people (I read the WoW forums) get so worked up over something so easily taken care of.

What does it do?

People get irritated because its a game, we are supposed to be relaxing and having fun, not getting spammed with ads and getting scam crap in our mailbox.

I ran SLabs yesterday and got FIVE in an hour.

You live under a rock?

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: CKent

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: CKent
Get the SpamSentry addon, duh. I've never seen so many people (I read the WoW forums) get so worked up over something so easily taken care of.

What does it do?

People get irritated because its a game, we are supposed to be relaxing and having fun, not getting spammed with ads and getting scam crap in our mailbox.

I ran SLabs yesterday and got FIVE in an hour.

You live under a rock?

Uhh no, my entire guild has never heard of that addon.

Ill go take a look though, since you apparently feel like being condascending rather than helpful.

 

[IlllI]

yeah i noticed this too. i quit playing about 6 months ago. never had problems with ANY gold selling websites spam me. i started playing last week. each, and every day. sometimes multiple times a day. spam. spam. sapm. and its always the same one or two websites too.

i dont know whats happened in the 6 months that i was gone, but i dont like it.

 

[CKent]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: CKent

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: CKent
Get the SpamSentry addon, duh. I've never seen so many people (I read the WoW forums) get so worked up over something so easily taken care of.

What does it do?

People get irritated because its a game, we are supposed to be relaxing and having fun, not getting spammed with ads and getting scam crap in our mailbox.

I ran SLabs yesterday and got FIVE in an hour.

You live under a rock?

Uhh no, my entire guild has never heard of that addon.

Ill go take a look though, since you apparently feel like being condascending rather than helpful.

Sorry but it's like ... not knowing there are mages and rogues in the game or something. The aversion to and FUD about WoW addons is a lot like what happens with PCs in the real world. I feel like a geeksquad tech, I could probably charge people $10 a head for telling them about addons

Originally posted by: clandren
yeah i noticed this too. i quit playing about 6 months ago. never had problems with ANY gold selling websites spam me. i started playing last week. each, and every day. sometimes multiple times a day. spam. spam. sapm. and its always the same one or two websites too.

i dont know whats happened in the 6 months that i was gone, but i dont like it.

Epic flying mounts cost 5200g.

 

[Bateluer]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Got any better ideas?

Write Blizzard, with snail mail, and inform them of your decision to terminate your subscription because of the overwhelming spam. Be polite and courteous and let them know that you'll resubscribe when the problem is fixed.

The only way corporate is going to do anything about a negative situation in their game is when it effects their dollar.

 

[Aikouka]

Blizzard won't do anything about it, because these spam accounts aren't normal accounts... they're trial accounts that the spammers create. Blizzard refuses to "nerf" the trial accounts further, because they'd rather get more people hooked via a not-so-dumbed-down trial than possibly lose potential customers by helping their current customers by removing an annoyance.

EDIT:

http://wow-en.curse-gaming.com/downloads/details/4150/spamsentry-anti-goldspam/

That's the link for SpamSentry

 

[CKent]

Originally posted by: Aikouka
Blizzard won't do anything about it, because these spam accounts aren't normal accounts... they're trial accounts that the spammers create. Blizzard refuses to "nerf" the trial accounts further, because they'd rather get more people hooked via a not-so-dumbed-down trial than possibly lose potential customers by helping their current customers by removing an annoyance.

EDIT:

http://wow-en.curse-gaming.com/downloads/details/4150/spamsentry-anti-goldspam/

That's the link for SpamSentry

I think there's a lot more to it than that. Namely, someone spending $15/month might just up and quit, but someone spending $150/month is more likely to stick around because of their investment. Sale of gold means customer retention. Is that enough? I dunno, I think it's likely Blizzard is getting a cut of the profits from the major selling sites. It's a huge industry. Sony tapped into it with EQ2's SOE Exchange servers. Of course, with the 12 people playing all their games combined, they have to max profits where they can ...

 

[pontifex]

Originally posted by: Acanthus

Originally posted by: Schadenfroh
It will not work.

Got any better ideas?

Ive already done the "sign up every linked email on the site for thousands of spam emails" technique.

yeah, ignore it. they aren't going anywhere and nothing you can do will stop them.

 

[QuantumPion]

The spammers aren't using trial accounts, trial accounts cannot send whispers to other players.

I think Blizzard should just block anyone lower then level 10 from whispering other players that are not on your friends list. That would significantly decrease the amount of adds.

 

[Modeps]

Originally posted by: QuantumPion
The spammers aren't using trial accounts, trial accounts cannot send whispers to other players.

That's weird. I got a 10 day trial that I'm on right now... and I can whisper to people fine.

 

[abaez]

They are fixing this in 2.1 - I forgot what they were doing but it would pretty much eliminate it (one tell every three seconds?) something like that.

 

[xSkyDrAx]

stop playing

 

[Modeps]

Originally posted by: xSkyDrAx
stop playing

At least you have a place to give your two cents, eh?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Modeps

Originally posted by: QuantumPion
The spammers aren't using trial accounts, trial accounts cannot send whispers to other players.

That's weird. I got a 10 day trial that I'm on right now... and I can whisper to people fine.

You can whisper on a trial account, but you can't send mail or use global chat channels. I also get spam mail, so sometimes they're not just using trial accounts. Making trial accounts incapable of speaking to anyone else other than through /say might solve this spam problem but would undoubtedly make trial accounts even more of a PITA.

It's gotten worse lately, probably due to lazy people who don't want to earn 5K gold for an epic flying mount (although it's really not THAT bad, as gold is extremely easy to earn in TBC). As mentioned above, I think they are throttling mail and whispers in 2.1 so that spammers can't use automated tools to whisper/mail everyone on the server nearly instantly. Hopefully that will cut things down a bit.

From what GMs have told me, they do close accounts that get reported -- although as noted, they can just keep opening trial accounts. I'm not sure if they follow up with IP bans, but they're not that hard to get around using web proxies.

 

[JohnAn2112]

It's been getting worst lately, at least for me. The annoying ones are the ones that spam you like 5 lines at a time so if your entire chat window is taken up. It sucks when you're in a BG or an instance run and you have to scroll through the wall of text to see what others wrote.

 

[Modeps]

Is there an easy way to report spammer accounts? Possibly just setup a macro or something?

Also, any chance that Spamsentry works on OS X? (it looked like it may be only for Windows)

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: Modeps
Is there an easy way to report spammer accounts? Possibly just setup a macro or something?

Also, any chance that Spamsentry works on OS X? (it looked like it may be only for Windows)

Very few add-ons have executables with them. They're typically only add-ons that upload statistics and things like that. WoW add-ons use LUA code, so they're OS independent.

 

[CKent]

Originally posted by: Aikouka

Originally posted by: Modeps
Is there an easy way to report spammer accounts? Possibly just setup a macro or something?

Also, any chance that Spamsentry works on OS X? (it looked like it may be only for Windows)

Very few add-ons have executables with them. They're typically only add-ons that upload statistics and things like that. WoW add-ons use LUA code, so they're OS independent.

Correct.

I have spamsentry set up to not even notify me when i get one. When I'm about to log off, I just look at it and if it's caught any, I send a quick report (the addon automates it). That way when the GM responds I'm offline and I dont' have to deal with their annoying macro'd responses lol...