An idea to handle whisper bots.

[Extreem]

Just thought of something to deal with whisper bots. There is probably no way to actually "eliminate" them, but a way to work around them.

Firstly, all people on your friends list are allowed to whisper you at anytime of course. What if b.net implemented a whisper "mail box" kind of thing. When you are whispered by an account not on your friend list you get a symbol alert, maybe like a green exclamation point on your character avatar while sitting in a channel. If you are in a game a green exclamation point appears on the top left of the screen or something.

When in a channel you can mouse over the exclamation point near your character avatar to see what the account name is. You can either click on it to view the whisper out of the actual chat log, or select block account to block further whispering. This whisper log records all whispers from all accounts to your account and you can at anytime erase any or all to save room. Hopefully bnet can remember all names that you have blocked. If it's an account that's not on your friend list, but you expected a whisper you select allow account to always allow whispers from them and bnet remembers it.

This method is kinda a little complicated to explaining how I actually visualize this method, but maybe later I can figure out how. How does this sound?

[Gamekk]

I know, add something like a command /dnd !

Oh wait...

And besides... whisper bots? You only get 1 or 2 whisper when you exit the lobby. I never read public chat anyways... that's not a big deal. If you have some trouble with a dude whispering you in your games you can always /squelch him if you don't want to use /dnd.

[HeroQuest]

Yer, it does seem like MORE of a pain checking your mailbox. At least the way it is now i dont have to do anything to get spammed. I;d be pretty pissed if i had to actually make an effort to get spammed

[Mortekai]

Limit the number of allowed character accounts for each license key and then allow players to ban usernames or ignore them. That way we can choose to ignore spambots, even if of course the evil spammers will bulk up on license keys and have thousands of accounts, but at least we can shut them up for the time being

Would be nice with a warn or report feature as well that send the reported spam to Blizzard so they can disable the account if its a legit report.

[Deuterium]

The bots that enter games and spam advertising for Item/"Lewt" sites are far more aggravating. I can take the odd easily ignorable green text in a public channel. There just seems to be so much more of the former.

[Xitium]

When you start a game, go through and squelch all of the level 1's in your chat lobby. You will be golden for most of the night, maybe get one more.

[PlasmaTorture]

Originally Posted by Gamekk

I know, add something like a command /dnd !

Oh wait...

And besides... whisper bots? You only get 1 or 2 whisper when you exit the lobby. I never read public chat anyways... that's not a big deal. If you have some trouble with a dude whispering you in your games you can always /squelch him if you don't want to use /dnd.

/squelch rarely works on the whisper bots. It usually errors and says they're not logged in. :/

The whisper ones are annoying, but not as bad as the join + quit spammers.

[Gamekk]

Originally Posted by PlasmaTorture

/squelch rarely works on the whisper bots. It usually errors and says they're not logged in. :/

The whisper ones are annoying, but not as bad as the join + quit spammers.

Hehe, well i guess it's a bit more of trouble to squelch a bot that constantly re-creates accounts.

For the join + quit spammers, you can always use a level requirement in your game or go private. The level requirement doesn't have to be very low, like when you're level 80 you can set it to like 40, but anyway you don't want people below level 40 in your public baal games.

And I guess I just got used to the whisper bots... since having so many friends on the f list constantly using /f m to reply whispers 'cus they're lazy, and they join games you don't want to know all the time, you know lol. For a clear screen press n

To definitly get rid of them, pay to play would solve the problem but it won't happen, so I guess and IP kind of squelch could work or CD-KEY squelch. I'm sure they'll solve this in dIII

[Akse]

Get that green mark then accept or deny. When you accept automaticly all whispers from that user will get trough. Spammers will get to deny list and never get trough again.

Well in Wow there is this nice addon "spammenot" you can set a minimun character level that can whisper you. Lets put level 1 and only > level 1 characters can whisper to you. Or you don't even see the "say" text either. You block everything from every level 1 that tries to write something. You can also check from the UI of the addon what names have been blocked and the message they wrote.. so you can accept to see it if someone with a bank account or something tried to whisper you.

Something like that should be in battle.net 2. A filter system, maybe even more sophisticated. You could block messages by just some words. put a *.com to the list and any spammer that tries to advertise their item site will get blocked. This kind of features have been in many irc clients for years.. The word filter would be fun to use to block all german spam you see in europe realm

[Raging_Zealot]

For the join/spam/leave bots, I've found that even though it errors out when you squelch them through the game GUI, it still stops you from seeing their chat. I also have used the "squelch all obvious bots in channel once leaving the lobby" method and it works well for those bots that whisper you several times while you are in chat and even when you join games.