34 replies to this topic

[iCare]

...........

1. Captcha upon log in..
2. Force GateWay log in.
3. Virtual Keyboard for password?

[AtlasThunderbeef]

Gateway login sounds good.

I don't get the virtual keyboard though.. it's the same commands.


Imagine if we had Gateway as an interface overlay ingame!


Just like steam, that would be so awesome.

[ZeroTigress]

Imagine if we had Gateway as an interface overlay ingame!


Just like steam, that would be so awesome.

I prefer xFire's in-game interface. It's more out out of your face. Gateway would be the opposite with pop-ups to buy WP.

[Hacks]

Why not just add something like a captcha to the training grounds? Don't add any fancy colors to it so it can't be parsed. Embed it in random lines of text. And ask the players to find the string.

The string could be randomly generated. It could consist of math problems, one word answers, etc.

That'd stop the autocreation of new novices on new accounts when one gets banned.

To stop the spamming in town via a bot (as Azzy suggested), I imagine that could work. The GMs, however, would need to learn that software and how to use it. Seems a bit counterproductive.

And then there's also the risk of trusting untrusted software.

A more viable solution, although it would require work on the server end (which seems to need to go through kRO) would be to allow players ingame to report characters ingame as potential spammers. Something like /spammer "Charname". The character would get flagged and it would initialize a counter. If there's a spam bot in town, enough people would report it. Allow 1 report per IP address (to limit abuse during WoE), and set a threshold at something like...100. Then, once that character is reported 100 times (maybe that's too high), the player would receive an ingame captcha popup where they're required to entire in a requested line of text. Failure to do it successfully after 3 attempts results in a 1 hour ban. Something like that.

only problem with /spammer is bots would have access to it as well, and it's so easy for 300+ bots to /spammer everybody one at a time resulting in far more false positives than true ones. i think we had a "manner" or "alignment" system like forever ago that was removed due to abuse. a bot scripted for spambot removal is the best option, may take a while to work the kinks out but once fully and properly implemented could very quickly put an end to the spam in prontera as well as maintain the required records in case of dispute later. as for untrusted software, according to a quick google, it's open source so the code can be audited for backdoors and whatnot and a trusted binary can be compiled.

[renouille]

If I go on IRC and start flooding... the server will kick me off very quickly.
If I go on battle.net and start flooding... the server will kick me off very quickly and block my CD key / IP (or something like that).
If I go on AIM and start flooding... well, you get the idea.

If I go on RO and start flooding... nothing happens, except I chew up a ton of bandwidth and annoy many people (or possibly few people if the line is blocked by manner.txt, but I still waste their bandwidth and they won't even know).

What's wrong with this picture?

[AtlasThunderbeef]

I prefer xFire's in-game interface. It's more out out of your face. Gateway would be the opposite with pop-ups to buy WP.

But it's an interface nonetheless~! If they manage to make the interface great, without popups and shitty stuff then it'll work alright I think.

Though that is a long strech.

[Lambor]

The problem? The automated chat block is done client side and not server side. These bots run outside of the client so they're able to bypass all blocks that gravity has placed, client side.

Seems easy enough to fix from the server side of things though.

It all stems back to the fact that kro owns this game and iro does not. Any sufficient, respectable way to fix these problems all go back to headquarters. And that seems to e queued.

Does iRO even have the server source? Probably not. Just licensed usage.

[Daray]

...
ask the players to find the string.
The string could be randomly generated. It could consist of math problems, one word answers, etc.

That'd stop the autocreation of new novices on new accounts when one gets banned.
...

That would stop the bots for about ... a day or two. (read: once they find the pattern/regexp (q&a/mathproblem recognition w/e))
Also it would likely be easier for the bots to figure the string out than for players, making another "bot blocking feature" that ends up only bothering real players.

[Sera]

Hm... is there no way for the GMs to generate a database log of who says what and database ban obvious botspammers? A modern machine dedicated to log generation serverside could probably easily handle the data, a particular name consisting of randomized letters shows up continuously saying garbage, it is blocked from accessing the server.

Something like that seems a hell of a lot easier than having the GM manually log into the game and walk around trying to find and ban the bots.

[AtlasThunderbeef]

We have to remember Ragnarok Online is an old game. It doesn't have the technology that new games built on new code has.

And we lost the original creator pretty early, it's no wonder we don't have too much amazing stuff anymore.