WTS/Boosting ads in LFG are back

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Since I came back to the game almost 2 years ago, ads in the LFG tool have been a recurring problem. Every day, I right click report many but they continue to pop up.

A common reply is that there’s “nothing that can be done about them because they’ll evade bans.” but, respectfully, think that’s being used as an excuse to not try at all.

For example, I play many alts and I have to manually report 5-10 listings per day per character. Reports are deduped on the server side, so why does it not hide these results across all characters after one report?

Server side automated filtering - these listings all use the same or very similar texts that could be automatically identified. I don’t think I can put curse words in them but phrases like “WTS” are allowed. There are advanced algorithms for spam detection that are used by email servers that increase the time and cost for anyone to evade them - this is the same strategy video games employ in their anti cheat technology, as Blizzard is well aware of.

These patterns extend to the types of characters used that are almost always lvl 60 druids. This is probably best used as an additional signal to the above rather than on its own.

I’m under the impression that trial accounts cannot list groups so there are financial signals that can be used. Shared names, addresses, credit cards, phone numbers. If these accounts are banned as claimed, they’d a finite supply of legitimate details.

The most critical aspect of this is that the people posting these listings must be generating more revenue than it costs them, bans included. To me, this is the strongest indicator that the current approach is not working. If you sell $1000 of a service but are fined $40 every few months then it’s a cost of doing business, not a disincentive. The equation needs to change.

This begs the question, why hasn’t preventing WTS spam in LFG been a priority for the last 2 years (at least)?

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I am not sure where you are seeing this, but I can assure you that is not the case, though they will evade bans, and often use hacked accounts to further their criminal cause. Reports are good, please if you can, but it’s understood not all can be reported.

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There are quite a few posters on the forums who say things like that all the time, though I suspect it’s often a smaller number of people who use alts to make it look like there’s more people saying it.
Whenever the subject of botting/rmt/etc comes up there’s people rushing to try to discourage people from reporting it.

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That may be, but Kozzae isn’t one of them.

You need to step back and think about why profanity filters don’t work. Altcodes, spacing, punctuation all make for a very high number of combinations even around your WTS example. The amount of time to write those filters isn’t a productive use of developer time.

There do need to be improvements, like account wide ignores, in that when I ignore a character it ignores that entire account on my entire account.

That being said, don’t mistake but doing it your way for not caring or not doing anything.

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I see that boosting stuff all the time, especially when it came to Season of Discovery or even Classic Anniversary. It got to the point to where my fingers hurt from reporting them so much. They’re out there though.