Spam Filter

[Drakhon]

http://www.aionsource.com/forum/aion...-goldspam.html

A guy wrote a spam filter for Aion. It works by acting as a proxy for the chat connection (and only the chat connection, it's on a different port than game info) and filtering the packets based on a list of regular expressions.

I decompiled it and took a look, but I don't know anything about .NET beyond what I can figure out by deduction. It appears to not have anything malicious and others in that thread have looked at it and agreed. He also posted the source later in the thread.

No official response from NCSoft yet, though. The proxying itself can't be a problem as it's the same way that GamePath and such work, but they could theoretically dislike the filtering aspect because it is "modifying the stream" as Mythic would put it. Those of the older DAoC crew may remember the addon that let you use ] commands (as opposed to / commands) to do things like look up a player on the Herald from within the game. The filter works in a similar manner to how that accepted commands and displayed responses, but this is NCSoft, not Mythic, so no idea how they'll respond.

[Gisli]

That is a really interesting thread. One thing this is going to do, if nothing else, is put pressure on NCSoft to come up with a solution. This person has demonstrated a powerful way that users can control their chat input. It would be fairly easy for NCSoft to package this up and give users in-game control in a nearly identical way. Even easier would be for them to maintain their own blacklist filter. So there is no excuse for them not to do something similar. Basically, if they attempt to ban the proposed solution without simultaneously providing one of their own that is at least as good, they will walk into a firestorm.

I see only two downsides to this. (1) It is a little bit complicated to set up. In the thread there are a couple of attempts to give "user friendly" detailed instructions on setting it up. (2) A careless user can easily filter too much. So for example, you could lose all messages from anyone that happens to include the words "gold" or "kinah". That would make it really difficult to discuss a gold necklace.

[Isak]

I only spent about 10min looking through it so far but I didn't see any thing malicious.

[Drakhon]

A careless user can easily filter too much. So for example, you could lose all messages from anyone that happens to include the words "gold" or "kinah". That would make it really difficult to discuss a gold necklace.

Very true. Regular expressions are not for the untrained.

[Drakhon]

Interestingly, this news entry on the official site indicates that using the built-in Block feature helps them get gold sellers banned. I assume it is that they can list characters by how many people have blocked them and use that as a means of identification.

[Gisli]

Yesterday, it was like somebody flipped a switch and turned off the gold spammers. IIRC, I got exactly one /whisper all evening, and that was sometime around midnight.

[Drakhon]

Well, the most abundant problem is/was in the LFG channel - it is near-constant gold spam and thus even more useless than it already was (most people turn it off due to people using it incorrectly). I have it turned off for the chat tabs that I use, so I can't say what the state was last night.

I haven't had much trouble with whispers, though I go /anon when I get the first one since I usually forget to do it right when I log in. It does generally takes a good while for that one to come in, however.

[Cillbo]

Spam seems to be worse in the daytime (EST) for me, and I noticed a drastic decline in spam for the hour or so I was online this afternoon. I know it's an anecdote, but maybe it's a good sign.

[Broggle]

i got spammed to death last night so maybe it was just random

[Voltari]

I got on for a bit, around 11pm PST, and had to block about 10 gold farmers spamming in the general chats. To make it stopped. I get occasional whispers from gold spammers. But that doesn't bother me any where near the general chat ones.