Temporary Solution to Bots

This probably is a temporary solution but it might help for a little while.

Since a bot sits in a town and just pm's people constanly over and over. How about putting a suppress message on whispers. This would be logical so that it would have to wait a few minutes in between its spam. Not neccassarily stopping them but slowing them down a bit. Maybe this was a stupid idea

dont gw have this same program that bans bots just like the auto-undo bots on wikipedia that continually moniters vandalism?

UM maybe? I don't know but I do know they run rampant in ascalon, gtob, kamadan, shing jea, and many other places.

The better option would be to have a way for each player to limit who can send them a whisper to just guild members or friends. The problem is, if you set a threshold, the botters will simply key their whisper rate to that threshold.

Another option, which is possibly detrimental to real players, would be to have random gm-challenge questions; periodically, you hear a tone and are given 30 seconds to answer a simple math question, or you get kicked from the game.

Anet made that Report System for reason, Ban Bots/Scammers/Gold Sellers/Hackers. I say "BAN THOSE Punks" would use a swear word but it might be against Guru Agreement refrain it. That my Solution to it plain and simple.

I'm sure there are a good many people who do report them, but the time it takes to examine the reports and ban the botters is greater than the time it takes for them to simply register another trial account and launch the script or w/e it is they use to start the bot on its merry way...

Or Like Bender Would Say " Like KILL ALL THE BOTS/SCAMMERS/HACKERS" hehe . That actually way better solution.

again ugg not another thread "how to fix..."

My temporary solution to bots is Do Not Disturb.

they should just remove trial accounts i'm sure there is like 90% botters who uses them and 10% players who want to try it, so no sense to actualy leave it. And i doubt they wll get many more new players just because they have trial accounts...

I'm not really sure of all the legalities involved in this, however all the bots are for one site, RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO

which also offer this "Service" for WoW, MapleStory etc.

So, if it's becoming such a problem couldn't something legally be done to this "company" to shut them down or put a stop to the botting etc?

I'm don't play WoW, so I don't know if bots are a problem on WoW like they are here, but I'd think the companies would take legal action against this site.

(assuming there is a law they could get them on)

Edit: and please excuse my lack of structure it's 4am =)

My solution to the gold sellers would be to suppress any chat message containing the gold sellers URL. Program the suppressing code to remove all spaces before checking against the suppress list.

Suppress any characters they add in to bypass the filter. For instance there is an invisible character that can be placed in a blocked word to bypass most filters, so that character alone should be enough to suppress the message.

Over time two things will happen:

1 - In order to get their URL through they will need to mangle it. Eventually they will get to a point where it is too mangled for players to translate into an actual URL, so that URL will become useless.

2 - Gold sellers buying new URLs, costing them money (though not much). These new URL's will just be blocked again.

The only thing I'm wary of here is when this filter blocks legitimate chat, so we can't have automatic bans or silent message suppression. While I can't think of any current gold selling URL's that are close enough to legit chat to cause false positives, the gold sellers will try other URLs in an attempt to raise the false positive rate.

"O Noes not moar bots!!!"

There are so many threads currently open on bot prevention methods I'm going to shut this one down.

/locked