Chat Filter - Customize

We currently have only very poor control of the Chat filter and besides, the community has found many ways to circumvent the filter anyways. So basically, currently it does nothing and is useless in itself. Another problem is that it simply doesn't catch different languages, such as german, french or spanish. And on top of that, every change A-Net would implement, would just be circumvented within seconds. See: noob -> n00b. WTS -> \/\/TS.

So, basically i'm suggesting that the Chat filter should be made customizeable and also based upon a small textfile. Let me explain this in detail. We have our textfile, each line represents one applied filter. # represent comments

Channels:
1 - Local
2 - Guild
3 - Team
5 - Trade
6 - Ally
7 - Whisper
8 - Notifications
9 - All

Word:
For the ease of use, all words are compared in lowercase. You can use wildcards and placeholders.

* small wildcard - can represent an unspecified amounts of characters inbetween ONE word
x large Wildcard - can represent an unspecified amounts of characters
. placeholder - represents one character inbetween



Mode:
1 - Replace
2 - Delete Sentence
3 - Temporary Auto Ignore for 5 Minutes

The structure consists of three parts, separated by a ","
"Channel", "Word", "Mode"

Okay, sounds quite complex to start with, so let's just make an example. You don't like the "word" noob. And you want to never read it again from some random person. However, you and your friends are often joking around calling each other noob just out of fun. So your line for the word noob would look as following:

"135", "noob", "1"

Means: On the channels local, team and trade everytime "noob" gets typed your personal clientside chatfilter removes the word completely and replaces it with ----.
However, this is much more powerful than just replacing single words. For example, you hate tradespam in Localchannel and don't want it to spam your chat completely into oblivion.

"1", "wts"&"wtt"&"wtb", "2"

Means:
Channel local is filtered for wts, wtt and wtb and everytime it detects one of those, your client simply doesn't show the line. As if it were never ever typed.

Next example, you seriously hate those "has won the hall of heroes" spam all the time and don't want to read it anytime soon.

"8", "has won", "2"

Et voilá. It never hits your screen again.

Conclusion:
The reason to make this a textfile is that people could easily exchange their filters (Community works, anyone? ) and update appropiately. A-Net on their side would only have to update this once and never ever care about the Chatfilter again and once a few good lists have been worked out, the amount of support tickets due to some in game swearing would decline quite a bit.
The chatfilter would be clientside and thus, never add load to the servers, just your client.
The chances to abuse this are null, it's your own personal decision what you want to have filtered and what not. And i kindly ask the local chat tradespammers to keep in mind that some folks simply don't want to read their tradespam - before unsigning this.

What are your opinions? Any suggestions on how to improve this? Hate it? Like it?

Would this be applied before gw's filter or after?

That looks mysteriously like coding. Tsk tsk.

You may want to edit that from code, to a full interface with fields, much like how Gmail and Yahoo email work. You would create a new filter, with information about what channels it will apply to, what to look for, and what to do with it.

The interface would allow you to browse through all your personalized filters, edit them at all, etc.

Also: Include another Mode option "change sentence to channel X". That way, rather than just deleting local tradespam, you could filter all the WT.Bs to the Trade Channel. Or, alternatively, you could transfer ALL trade chat to local chat if you just don't like the colour of trade chat.

Also also: -_- While we're at it, ability to change chat colours plzkthx