Genius Female Gamer Roseraven Invents Antispam Tactic!!

Roseraven totally rocks.

Last night she came up with a brilliant idea for defeating WoW spam. For those non-WoWers amongst us, when you play WoW you get frequent unsolicited IMs from people running gold farming and leveling services.

I’ve gotten as many as five per hour (including spam for leveling services on my max level character). They are a major irritant. However, there’s not a lot you can do. Typically the spammers buy new accounts, make characters to go in and do their dirty work (no doubt copy + pasting macro text with the names of the spam recipients), delete that character and go buy a new boxed copy of WoW.

So you can’t ignore them, most of the characters actually sending the spam only live brief lifespans anyway. And even if you go to all the time consuming trouble of reporting them and getting them banned, they’ll be back in an hour on a new account anyway.

We do have a couple of evil guildies that know how to do arcane things with peoples’ bandwidth who were planning a hit on the spammers’ websites. And I understand Blizzard is taking legal action, but that’s slow as molasses and complicated if the spammers are basing their operations out of different locations.

But last night, Rose figured that if everybody had a /reply message hotkeyed, we can fire back at the spammers by replying to them several times. If you get more than one person doing this it can lock them up to the point where their macro can’t run. If you’re in a great big guild (like ours) and coordinate a bunch of people doing this . . .

Also, Rose mentions that the spammers have to log their spam so their evil overlords will pay them their thirteen cents for a night’s work, or whatever they earn, and the multiple reply messages will fill their logs with all kinds of angry messages that can fill their hard drives and perhaps impress upon the evil overlords how much players hate this kind of thing.

Not to mention that reply bombing a particular character can force them to crash right off the server.

My first spammer got about twenty reply IMs reading “hi, I’m in a guild with 500+ people and every one of us knows how to send these autoreply messages, so I therefore suggest you take your spamming operation elsewhere.” After the first barrage I got reply messages stating his character no longer exists. I take it others were firing back too, thus preventing him from spamming to the point where he either got kicked out by a GM or deleted the character out of frustration.

Many of the spammers join our guild just to harvest names for their list, because one person in guildchat will report being spammed at the same time as several others. Which means that if the spammers try to go for our entire membership, they’re just opening themselves up to getting 500 irate replies spammed at them for each message they send.

After beta testing this concept, a couple of the spammers took to the trade channel instead . . . which means that a GM can just click their names to permaban them. And after this a GM personally contacted Roseraven to thank her.

So I want to thank her too, and I think she deserves awards and applause for coming up with this, and if any other WoW players reading this are plagued by spam, just get together with some of your friends and make a macro that says “/reply [long block of text telling spammers off]” and hotkey it somewhere, so that you can spam it several times whenever you get spammed.

Sure, they can report you for harassment, because this IS harassment – or counter-harassment anyway . . . and once the GM who responds sees their initial message, they’ll get kicked out. It’s like going to the police station to complain that somebody stole your drugs.

It reminds me of something that happened in Star Wars Galaxies once.

I was with my bf, who was playing his female toon and dancing AFK while we were talking IRL. Suddenly he glanced at the screen and spotted another player doing various kind of grope actions to the dancer. So we decided to mess with him.

First he challenged the guy to a duel, which was of course rejected (along with some gratuitous insults). But hey, what the rude guy didn’t know was that I had five accounts, and could run two simultaneously. So I started switching between them very rapidly, and we built up a story that we all lived in one of those group houses with many roommates and were playing on the LAN, and the entire house was so amused by his antics that the laughter was waking people up, and we were making screenshots and videos of it to put on our website.

We got a couple of other players in on it so it looked like there were even more of us. The guy had a little meltdown and finally logged to get away from us. For weeks afterwards players who heard about it were doing /giggle emotes when he walked by, and about a year later, he was in a pvp group that I joined – and after I joined it, he left the group, ran away and logged out.

I think ignoring the pests sometimes only gets them to escalate to the point where you can’t ignore them. At a certain point it’s even better to not only give them attention but to give them far more attention than they bargained for.

And I’m curious to see how much spam I’ll get tonight :)