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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsWhere's all the spam gone?
by Elizabeth Harper 
May 24th 2007 at 9:07AM
In today's breakfast topic, I noted that I haven't gotten any gold spam in the time I've played since patch 2.1.0 came along. And oh, what a change it is! I was always a good little player, taking the time to report any gold selling spam to a GM, but usually by the time a GM got around to looking at my ticket, I'd have gotten at least five more piece of spam -- and that was if I opened my ticket during off-hours.
So what's the magical change that's stopped spam in its tracks this patch? Obviously, there's the new spam reporting system, which makes reporting anyone an easy task: just right-click on their name and select the "report spam" option. You'll no longer get whispers, see text, or receive mails from that player for the duration of your game session and the incident is automatically forwarded on to a GM. But even if every player were duitifully reporting every spammer, I wouldn't expect such a dramatic change in the level of spam. CM Drysc notes that as of the patch, trial accounts can no longer whisper other players -- at least not without players whispering them first. I don't know about you, but I think this simple step may have been the magic bullet.
Filed under: Patches
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 2)
cbass May 24th 2007 2:37PM
How about not letting a player whisper (unless whispered to) until lvl 10. The spammers would have to invest hours in a character in order to blast spam. Not very efficient for the spammer. It would also prevent stupid n00bs from pst'ing to help them kill hogger. Peace out.
kestrelmas May 24th 2007 3:32PM
@21 - One can level a character from 1-10 in about an hour. Probably faster if it's an experienced farmer. :( Sad, but true... I wish it took the hours you mentioned.
I haven't gotten any tells yet on my two mains (on different servers), but just waiting for them to work around it. In the meantime, I'll keep my /dnd up and macro that spams them back. Based on someone else's comment on here, if they're stealing credit cards and spamming on those accounts... why would you -want- these people to have your credit card info for them to powerlevel your character / send gold?
Basic gist... buying gold is bad. Powerlevelling your character is bad.
Byron May 24th 2007 5:56PM
I'm still getting them pretty regularly, every 10 minutes or so. I just spam them back with non-stop party invites till they go offline. As soon as they decline, I re-invite. I figure the party-invite dialog box that pops up is at least as annoying and intrusive as their unwanted chat text.
Laurens Holst May 25th 2007 8:03AM
There IS flood control in 2.1.
I don’t know why people think there isn’t. Have you even bothered to read up about the new anti-spam measures before giving your opinion?
As for the spam: it’s much much less than it used to be, fo’ sure. I think that the spammers are now still trying what they can do with their remaining hacked accounts, and will hopefully in the coming weeks give up.
~Grauw
Reygar May 25th 2007 9:34AM
i don't know what you guys are smokin but i still get spammed as much as before the patch... absolutely no change for me.... now to update Spam Sentry...