That’s the key word. It’s not what they are selling, it how they are doing it, if the only thing keeping your post being seen is the chat timeout, slow down the frequency. Trade chat shouldn’t look like a Japanese bullet hell game.
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I have had guilds make low level characters to advertise their “guild” boosting on my server. I report these as spam and will continue to do so. Guilds on my server I have left alone. The major infraction boosting communities had were spamming on multiple servers in an extremely disruptive manner. Changing the name from community, to guild does not suddenly make it ok.
I would also advise guild boosting services to lay low for a bit. people are rightfully encouraged to report boosting spam since its now in a kind of grey area, and are not being even as discerning as I am.
Since ill get the inevitable questions, blizzard has stated guilds are allowed to boost, but they have not stated that guilds are effectively allowed to do the same thing the communities used to, and spam on unrelated servers. There have been mixed signals here. On one hand guilds are expressly permitted to do carrys across servers, but they havent been greenlit to spam like the communities used to.
The policy could use some TLC
Considering there seems to be so many people reporting others, it seems there are a lot of people who don’t use these services and are happy to have boost communities gone. The issue is that they don’t understand the difference between “cross server boosting communities aren’t allowed” and “boosting is banned.” So people are just tossing reports left and right, just like they did with anyone they saw with someone else following them, when multiboxing software was banned, but not actually multiboxing itself.
There really is no fix. They’re unsupported transactions. Blizz isn’t going to do anything except possibly reinstate chat privileges and sanction any false reports.
They can’t make a chat channel for unsupported stuff.
So we’re back at square one: which is the lesser of two evils?
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Being looked into is fine. The auto-silence shouldn’t happen since that is able to be abused and is abused in some states.
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Yup, this goes back to “players shouldn’t have the ability to apply penalties to other players” argument. Whether the penalty is temporary has zero bearing on the argument since it should never be happening to begin with. Mob mentality has no place in doling out punishments.
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Actually it is against the tos now. Guilds can still technically do boosts but you have to all be on the same server in the same guild. Now i firmly believe it should be outlawed 100% you either earn it or do it the old fashion way. That being said you need to look at the blue posts about it and look at the details about it. Spamming is spamming and boost is boosting the non boosting players will continue to report every single post your grps make so get with the program and follow the tos.
Yeah except you are reporting every ad you see I bet.
A good 10% of the US are extremely racist doesn’t make it the majority view.
Cross server boosting is specifically allowed what isn’t allowed is the middleman
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So other players both should not be able to chat, should not be able to vote kick players, or report players AFK in BGs?
Further, no one should be able to deny someone applying for their group, or remove someone from their group as that would penalize a player?
Perhaps they should.
… what is your problem? Nowhere did I ever talk about racism. Do you even read posts? Because your track record so far is completely horrible. First you try to argue with me about something that I never said, now you’re randomly tossing out racism comments, when it was never a topic.
Stop making ridiculous, nonsensical comments.
Hey Thallia, you mind if I ask for your interpretation of the “Account Silenced” article? It reads to me like getting silenced (the official penalty) is now straight-up automated.
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He just tried that with me too in another thread. Made a completely random and totally false claim which makes no sense. Easy to disprove as well.
I just…it is not logical.
I suspect your were right yesterday, waste of time to even reply.
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This is what it looks like when someone decides to turn Hard Mode on in real life.
No, that’s the silence they penalize you with after the automated squelch. It doesn’t sound automated, it just sounds like extremely simplistic wording for the process after the squelch. Because all squelchs are the same duration of time. The article specifically says:
The duration of your silence increases each time we apply it to your account.
And blue post says:
So that’s just the basic explanation of what happens when a GM reviews it.
Yeah… I don’t know. I can’t wrap my brain around those responses. LOL I may need to invoke the rare ignore function, but I try not to do that. Sometimes, people redeem themselves. 
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Fair, it’s just certain bullet points seem to define actual metrics which strongly suggest automation, particularly:
The first bullet indicates there’s a rolling period for counting reports, and the second bullet point indicates there’s an actual threshold that will trigger the silence once the threshold is reached.
I can’t imagine GMs being bound to thresholds if it was a manual review.
That’s just the history of your account that they keep. As a former moderator myself, back in the days of Sierra and Vivendi Universal, that’s what the computer shows us and our system greyed out those older reports. We could see they existed, but they weren’t counted and were put into their own category of “archived.” It’s not an automation as much as it’s an account history. It’s what mods and GMs use to determine sanctions, based on current circumstances and account history.
For anyone curious about what actually happens when your account is silenced, here’s the breakdown:
Basically how that works is it keeps a log of all lines of your text that have been reported over say a week, two weeks, etc. So GMs can see all the things you’ve been reported for and may have contributed to a squelch, a silence, or other action.
That means it still takes a certain amount of reports for a GM to review it, or for a squelch to occur.
So, say the threshold for keeping reports is 7 days, and the amount needed to hit the automated squelch is 5 (I don’t know how many, I doubt Blizzard is going to give a number.) Say you said something that upset a lot of players day 1, and you got 4 reports. No automated squelch occurs and it’s entirely possible they haven’t gotten to the ticket queue for 4 reports yet. Day 6 comes around, you say something that upsets at least one more person. It triggers the squelch, and now a GM has to review whether that was applied correctly or not.
But if you had made it to day 8, 4 reports would have fallen off, etc. I’m sure it works similarly to that as far as the automated squelch goes, but GMs can always review chat going back further manually.
“The number of abusive chat reports necessary to penalize your account remains the same, regardless of past penalties.” basically says that account history doesn’t matter in determining the number of reports needed before action is taken.
They’re saying there is a threshold defined that must be reached before penalties are applied, regardless of account history. This sounds very automated.
Again, I can’t imagine a manual review requiring thresholds to be met. So, an example:
GM: “Oh look, this guy got reported 9 times for being disgustingly toxic and name-calling. Too bad I’m not allowed to silence this guy for Abusive Chat until a 10th report comes in because that’s what my threshold is supposed to be!”
See what I mean?
I’m going to bring this up in the CS forums later today to make sure things haven’t changed since that blue post. It is a year and a half old and the support article says it was updated a year ago, so who knows.
Correct, which is why I said those were moved to an archived section of the account information. Our old system, which isn’t this system, we could look at the archive, but it took an admin to let us do so. This account info system may just delete them entirely for all we know.
The system I used is not Blizz’s system. It was an example.
I think you’re trying to push something here that doesn’t add up to the current argument.
An account history is an account history. Just like how things get archived on websites, forums, etc… so do the penalties on an account.
That’s an account program, not an automation bot that has nothing to do with you being silenced.