How to stop spam bots?

[Skatzi]

Not sure if this was addressed to me as I don't know how it solves anything. Shops will manually create, say 100 accounts. Then use those accounts to spam. We know how effective they've been at banning spam bots so this should work for quite a while. The only way around this is requiring a captcha when connecting to the game (realm/nexus/dung whatever) which would never happen.

I would probably quit the game if I had to put in a fucking capthca to enter the WC.

[marinepower]

Now that we've discussed this a bit, I feel like email verification would actually go a long way toward solving this problem. @nilly brought up a good point that bots could still be registered manually, so providing a simple captcha wouldn't be enough. Therefore, they could mark all existing accounts above 1 star as having been verified, and require all new accounts to get verification before they can chat. An email is literally required when you register, so even though rotmg caters to a younger audience it's assumed that they already have one before they play. New users can also still play as guests.

Of course, after they add in registration to solve the immediate spamming epidemic, they need to seriously think about having a report player feature, with a drop down for the reason. If enough people flag an account in a medium amount of time for the same offense, it'll lead to a suspension or a ban. As a very quick hack, they could even have it done from the chat command line, such as /report player_name [reason].


@JustAnoobROTMG
I haven't thought too deeply about that, but they could use something like the diff algorithm to compare the current message to previously posted messages. So, say the message contains 5 random letters each time, and the total length of the message is 100 characters. Then the algorithm would mark the new message as having .95% similarity to a previous message. This can then be multiplied by the length (.95*100) to give you a 'spam' score of 95. Also, let's assume that the bot account has a total of 5 different messages that it cycles through, and let's say it's already gone through 40 messages. Then there would be 8 messages all with a spam score of 95 giving the new message an overall spam score of 95*8 or 760. This is obviously very high, and would immediately qualify the user for a temporary speaking shadow ban. (They can type in messages and they'll see them, but no one else will. Great way to stop advertisers.)

I'm not sure what the threshold should be, since typing hi 100 times would only yield a spam score of 200, so it could perhaps be (length of the message + 8 for a spam score of 1000, or some other algorithm). Again, the only problem I foresee with this solution is trading, since it obviously requires very repetitive typing, yet shouldn't necessarily be marked as spam. Just mentioning the item you're selling would eventually be marked as spam, since the item names would be constant no matter what else you typed. So yeah, not sure.

[cehrenr]

Now that we've discussed this a bit, I feel like email verification would actually go a long way toward solving this problem. @nilly brought up a good point that bots could still be registered manually, so providing a simple captcha wouldn't be enough. Therefore, they could mark all existing accounts above 1 star as having been verified, and require all new accounts to get verification before they can chat. An email is literally required when you register, so even though rotmg caters to a younger audience it's assumed that they already have one before they play. New users can also still play as guests.

Doing this the shops already have thousands of spam-bot stored up and ready to go. I have a personal database of 20,000+ accounts I can use as bots, at least a few thousand of which are above 1 star. And I could have thousands more within hours of combing through some things.

No one who looks at any of these issues ever has any foresight. People on the WS forums called for fixes to anti-paralyze for forever, not realizing people already had anti-server side debuffs for months already.

If you think the people running spam bots haven't already looked at the most often suggested comments and pre-planned accordingly you're just fooling yourself. It'd take months to ban all the accounts I've accumulated if I did absolutely nothing to continue staying ahead.

Putting RWT back on the forums would be a better solution to spam bots than email verification / CAPTCHA at this point.

[bb1234bb]

You have little to no knowledge about captcha is you think you can brake them with simple ocr. reCaptcha is pretty damn hard to break, they change their algorithm every few days.

[TrinityCube]

You do realize that players can't sell stuff?

[honeycraft]

I dont see how it takes a recode to add a captcha or require email verification

this solution wouldnt fix anything? there is still correct bots to spam hotmails / gmails etc + auto verify accos etc
i am sure @Botmaker would find solution still =)

[marinepower]

@cehrenr
While you yourself might have thousands stored, it is certainly not the case that most people currently spamming the nexus have such a reserve of accounts. As such, this solution would solve most spam on the servers, and return the server to a state of normalcy after the bot dump. That is also why I have suggested some alternative, long term solutions as well as queried the community with this very thread to see if we could come up with something that could greatly reduce spam. Of course, this entire exercise is a thought experiment since none of us here are in a position to contribute to or modify the official server code. It's just a real life scenario that's currently being faced by the kabam dev team, and I thought it might be interesting to tackle it from a programming or social perspective.

@bb1234bb
I definitely agree. Captchas would greatly cut down on the amount of automatically created accounts, and people here are definitely underestimating the difficulty of solving at least the ones provided by The Official CAPTCHA Site Again, though, captchas are designed to be solvable by people, so spam bots can still be made without too much hastle at a rate faster than they can be banned. I suppose this entire experiment comes down to making it so inconvenient for people to spam that most, not all, stop trying.

[bb1234bb]

e-mail verification is really easy to bypass, just to connect to POP server, parse the link and than send GET request. It's way easier to make it via script than do it by hand, it will also cut the amount of mules people can use so it will not harm shop owners but regular players.

Like MarinePower said, its impossible to stop spam completely, but they should make it really annoying to perform.

[Botmaker]

e-mail verification is really easy to bypass, just to connect to POP server, parse the link and than send GET request.

Better yet just setup my own smtp server and domain name.

[bb1234bb]

Better yet just setup my own smtp server and domain name.

SMTP is for sending e-mails

[Botmaker]

SMTP is for sending e-mails

i have my own smtp server written in euphoria it can receive and send emails
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia