I'm Drowning in Spam

I have been playing Guild Wars since December. Until the last update, on Friday, my ignore list never contained more than 3 names. Now, it is full. Does ANet like spammers? Because this update, which claims to "the restrictiveness of the excessive messaging filter for party chat, guild chat and whispers" is CLEARLY also applying to local chat. Where once one had to wait 20 seconds to repost a message, now it appears to take closer to 5.

This is why my ignore list is full. Spammers are infesting every district of every town and outpost, because ANet has made life much easier for them. Why is this? I want to know! Furthermore, why is it that spammers can now spam to their heart's content, yet when I am helping someone, I still have to deliver several messages in quick succession, due to the miniscule character limit in chat? I really hate it when I need to cut off a message in the middle of a sentence, just to add three more words in a second message.

What I would like to see is the old spam-blocking or "excessive messaging" filter put back in place in local chat, and additionally, I would like to be able to post a 3-line message in whisper, party, guild and alliance chat.

If ANet will not do this, then I ask them: please, for the love of God, if you must make local chat a spammer's playground can you ALLOW PLAYERS TO IGNORE AN UNLIMITED NUMBER OF PLAYERS!!!??!?!

If they go with the latter, I hope they will also remove the limitation on the friends list.

In the meantime, I'll just have to update my ignore list every time I enter a town or outpost. Oh, joy.

Just turn of local chat when it's a problem. Waste of time to go through an ignore everyone spamming one by one in my opinion.

That would be overkill, and hardly an ideal solution. That makes it kinda (dripping with sarcasm, here) tricky to get a group together or recruit people for my guild...

My point is, ANet should not make life easier for spammers.

local chat is still "seen" by your text box. If you get alot of spam, after awhile you'll see your messages disappearing cause the log has reached its limit. so even turning it off, it can still cause problems.

the spam blcok filter has always been in place, the only problem is that people are somehow finding a way around it...

I don't care for local chat, I just have it switched off.

As do I. I just wish they'd all use the Trade chat. But bleh.

I, too, have noticed the increase in spam frequency. The problem I face with the thing is that, it is too fast for a normal convo for me (meaning, I get the excessive messaging thing popping up while in a normal conversation), but somehow the spammers get around it. :/

Good idea, but ANet will not implement that, as they want people to socialize. Heck, it took months of begging just to get ANet to allow people to ignore whispers and not just messages in the ALL channel.

That it is impossible to socialize because of the trade spam (and the ubiquitous simulated sex) anywhere there's more than ten players present seems to not have registered with ANet.

I've been playing for 2 days and after an hour of playing my ignore list was full, just unignore them after 5 minutes, add 5 more people and they wont remember who you are.

Then they can allow an unlimited number of friends, too. It's too much work for even the most fervent misanthrope to ignore everyone.

I think that it's not really an ideal solution anyway. The best plan, as I said, is: to put the old spam-blocking or "excessive messaging" filter put back in place in local chat. Don't even try to tell me it still is, I'll get a stopwatch and take down times to prove it isn't if I have to.

Again, not the same issue but it's related: I would like to be able to post a 3-line message in whisper, party, guild and alliance chat. Or even just a 2-line one. Right now the limit is about... what, 1 1/2 lines? I find it stupid that I can't do this, but spammers are having a field day... every day.

They should have something to really mess up sellers/buyers, it'll make it really easy. just switch ANYBODY that uses the letters W T S/B in the first part of thier sentence to trade chat. Either that or anybody who spams the same message more than 3X will get switched to trade chat.

They tried that with the WTS/WTB. That is why you now see \/\/TS. Doesn't really help. I'm all for a more strict Chatfilter in Local and Tradechat. But for gods sake, leave Guild, Team, Alliance and Whisper unaffected.

Whenever i'm explaining something, i will either have to wait 5 seconds after each line of typing or suffer from automated Text Supression. Whenever i'm just chatting with more than one person. Yep. Automated Text Supression. When we just have fun over our Guildchannel. Aye, that's right. >50% of my messages don't get through unless i'm waiting another full 5 seconds after each line.

So seriously A-Net, make the message filter strict as hell for local and trade but don't apply it to Guild, Team, Alliance, Whisper.

It does need to be fixed for team/guild/alliance/whisper. A few times recently I was having a normal conversation with someone and I kept getting my messages suppressed.

Who the hell wants to socialize with spammers anyways?