It appears that the automated spam reporting system can result in the silence of a player legitimately advertising services in Trade Chat. How can a player be protected from these automated silences? Do automated silences on accounts that are overturned or expire after a ticket is answered become a “history” which results in a harsher penalties at a later time?
How is Blizzard handling organized reporting and abuse of the spam reporting tool to kill competition?
As it stands, the tool is easily abusable to purposefully silence any competitor when a specific number of players report as spam. Some of the services group out there consist of thousands of players where this sort of behavior is common.
To be blunt, you cannot totally protect yourself from being subject to the squelch option. It is primarily a social system intended to allow the denizens of a realm to address spam. While it mostly focuses on advertising spam, like gold and illicit services, it also serves to deal with other spam.
You can probably reduce the likelihood that you’ll be squelched by reducing the number of times that you advertise. Your entire advertising line is fairly hefty and if I had to guess, that coupled with the frequency that it is being thrown out in Trade is not being positively received.
Looking at the reports and a chat search over the last few days, I’m afraid I can see the reasoning behind the reports and the current silence.
Can it be abused? Yes, unfortunately, there are limitations to a system like that. Easily? I would argue against that in most situations.
If you wish to appeal the silence, you can submit an appeal ticket and a Game Master will review the matter.
If you’d like to see a change to the reporting system, you’ll want to submit your feedback via the submit a suggestion option in the in-game help menu or by posting in the General Discussion forum. I’m afraid CS has no input on game or system development.
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You didn’t even read the thread or the SFAs post…
The OP spammed his message and got pinched. Seeing how the GM agreed with the reports and applied a 24 silence. if you you happened to get squelched or silenced, please put in a ticket to appeal it.
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