Request for gold spammer chat filter
I recently brought this up in another game and thought it would be worth a mention here too, since although I have't been playing tons lately most times I log in gloabl chat is hard to read becasue of spam. Since this game has limited LFG tools and relies on chat that is especially bad. Figured the following was wort a note:
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MMOs often have chat filters set up for profanity but never bother with gold sellers. Instead of just "bleeping" allegedly bad words, you could have a different class of bad that is a set of gold-spammer type URLs (they almost always post their URL):
1) x out the whole line if it registers as gold spam/etc
2) x out the line display with client logic for normal people and _leave it on_ for gold spammers so if the current spammer/hacked account was ever even looking very hard at their own screen they would not know (would need to see someone else's)
The same logic could be used to auto-flag and the possible spam accounts for review (or lock out of public chat if hitting a high limit). One line mentioning a keyword would be just be filtered, but 100 of them is almost a sure abuse and can then be locked/banned/whatever.
If spammers got savvy they might start mangling their URLs, but that can, at least to an extent, be combated with some different regular expression logic.
This type of regex coding is not that hard to do (honestly I am not a crack programmer and I would still find it fairly simple...), but it has a big benefit for global chat.