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#1 ItsMoonie

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Posted 15 September 2011 - 07:57 PM

This idea might seem a little bit, out there, but hey, thinking outside the box might be just what they wouldn't expect.

Anyway my idea is to create duplicates of the main towns they spam in (prontera, payon)
Throw in some fake shops to make it look authentic.
So now when a gm finds a spam bot in the town they @warp bot prontera#2 (116 , 83)
The bot is now spamming in a parallel universe.
When the bot owner comes to check on his bot, it will appear to him that the bot is still in town spamming just as he left it.
As opposed to finding it muted and just getting another bot to replace it.

Good, bad, stupid?

Edited by ItsMoonie, 15 September 2011 - 07:59 PM.

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#2 Seiken7

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Posted 15 September 2011 - 07:59 PM

Good.
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#3 NoxiousOrchid

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Posted 15 September 2011 - 08:03 PM

Only problem I see with this is they cannot replicate the map ID which some bots probably use determine if they are on the correct map. A /where would be all they needed to do to see if they were on the correct map.

It is a very interesting idea though.
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#4 ItsMoonie

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Posted 15 September 2011 - 08:32 PM

Only problem I see with this is they cannot replicate the map ID which some bots probably use determine if they are on the correct map. A /where would be all they needed to do to see if they were on the correct map.

It is a very interesting idea though.


Interesting point.
But there is simple things they could do to throw them off.
For example naming the fake town prontara

I bet that looks a hell of a lot like prontera to a chinese person.
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#5 MrBudd

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Posted 15 September 2011 - 10:57 PM

I don't see why iRO doesn't just ip range block the entire country. It's what jro did to cut back on the bots and it worked for them. Sure you'd end up pissing off a handful of players but sometimes you gotta cut your losses. I mean it's the reason why businesses won't ship products to certain countries.
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#6 LeonFlare

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Posted 15 September 2011 - 11:11 PM

I don't see why iRO doesn't just ip range block the entire country. It's what jro did to cut back on the bots and it worked for them. Sure you'd end up pissing off a handful of players but sometimes you gotta cut your losses. I mean it's the reason why businesses won't ship products to certain countries.


iRO ... international ragnarok online ...

and stupid
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#7 JohnBunny

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Posted 16 September 2011 - 03:11 AM

Yeah...can't IP ban. It's iRO. But why can't we require a SSN like Korea?
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#8 Easly

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Posted 16 September 2011 - 03:16 AM

if they asked for a ssn then it would only be america ro
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#9 renouille

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Posted 16 September 2011 - 04:01 AM

This idea might seem a little bit, out there, but hey, thinking outside the box might be just what they wouldn't expect.Anyway my idea is to create duplicates of the main towns they spam in (prontera, payon)Throw in some fake shops to make it look authentic.So now when a gm finds a spam bot in the town they @warp bot prontera#2 (116 , 83)The bot is now spamming in a parallel universe.When the bot owner comes to check on his bot, it will appear to him that the bot is still in town spamming just as he left it.As opposed to finding it muted and just getting another bot to replace it.Good, bad, stupid?

Had this idea before, but by itself it's really not much more than a short-term stopgap. Once they caught on they would just send a second bot to periodically check on the spamming ones.

Only problem I see with this is they cannot replicate the map ID which some bots probably use determine if they are on the correct map. A /where would be all they needed to do to see if they were on the correct map.It is a very interesting idea though.

They only need to make the bot think it's still on the map it wants to be on, but that would probably require more changes than they are willing/able to make.

Interesting point.But there is simple things they could do to throw them off.For example naming the fake town prontaraI bet that looks a hell of a lot like prontera to a chinese person.

Won't work. It may look like prontera to your caricature of a "chinese person", but it doesn't look like prontera to the real client (crashes) or to the bot client that they all use (dies with an error message if I'm not mistaken).

I don't see why iRO doesn't just ip range block the entire country. It's what jro did to cut back on the bots and it worked for them. Sure you'd end up pissing off a handful of players but sometimes you gotta cut your losses. I mean it's the reason why businesses won't ship products to certain countries.

The connections are coming from the United States.

if they asked for a ssn then it would only be america ro

This, and they have no way to verify SSNs.
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#10 MrBudd

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Posted 16 September 2011 - 06:37 AM

If the connections are coming from the us then it simplifies things. Ssns could work if they can find a way to verify it.

Easiest way RO handle this is to charge a $1 registration fee. Yeah you'd screw over the cheapskates but whatever.
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#11 JohnBunny

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Posted 16 September 2011 - 07:44 AM

If the connections are coming from the us then it simplifies things. Ssns could work if they can find a way to verify it.

Easiest way RO handle this is to charge a $1 registration fee. Yeah you'd screw over the cheapskates but whatever.


To this day, I'm still trying to figure out (even for a 14 year old) why a ONE time 7$ fee is unobtainable...
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#12 Inubashiri

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Posted 16 September 2011 - 08:07 AM

Unfortunately spam bots require much more aggressive tactics. There are many stop gap measures but thats about treating the symptoms and not the cause.
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#13 DieNasty

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Posted 16 September 2011 - 08:56 AM

If the connections are coming from the us then it simplifies things. Ssns could work if they can find a way to verify it.

Easiest way RO handle this is to charge a $1 registration fee. Yeah you'd screw over the cheapskates but whatever.


Charging a $1 fee to sign up is a great idea. The problem here is a lot of the RO players are still teenagers of some sort so I don't think they have a credit card to create an account. This might hurt the game population. Then again Gravity could implement a system where you can pay using your mobile phone so that people can sneak in that $1 dollar into their phone bill without their parents knowing.
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#14 Easly

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Posted 16 September 2011 - 09:15 AM

Charging a $1 fee to sign up is a great idea. The problem here is a lot of the RO players are still teenagers of some sort so I don't think they have a credit card to create an account. This might hurt the game population. Then again Gravity could implement a system where you can pay using your mobile phone so that people can sneak in that $1 dollar into their phone bill without their parents knowing.



Using a phone might actualy be a good idea, like when you register you get sent a text to your number with a code that you enter to finish the registration. if an account linked to that number is banned then you wouldent be able to register anymore with it unless you mail the gms or something
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#15 Kadnya

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Posted 16 September 2011 - 09:31 AM

I don't think banning any IP would work. There are programs like proxycap and others, and several free socket proxies to choose from daily that I don't feel an IP ban would change anything. RO also checks for IP only when logging in, but once you are logged in to select server, you may turn off your proxy and connect to RO and use your real IP (and in this case, run their bots with another IP and yet still bot without proxy and extra lag from proxy).

A copy from prontera wouldn't work also. Since bots don't really see what we see in the client, but only map IDs, IPs, and such, for them, a map which looks like prontera and is called "prontera" would be as different as if they were warped to rachel, juno, or other map: completely different.

The mobile phone idea sounds oki if it can work outside of USA too.
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#16 Heimdallr

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Posted 16 September 2011 - 02:47 PM

All of these ideas would work in a perfect world but things like proxies exists, and the spammers utilize them extensively.

Duplicate prontera would not fool a bot, the map id wouldn't match where it is set to go and at best it would just log out. If a GM is going to the trouble of moving them we mute them anyway and block them.

SSN there is no verification of it, and our company wouldn't want to be responsible for storing your SSN as in the US that would be a dubious legality and difficulty in verifying. Some countries do use SSN, but they have different uses there than in the US.

The start up fee for an account is something that could work, as long as we didn't accept the payment methods that can be charged back, which means using ones that may not be convenient for that player. It also is a significant impact on new user registrations. How many of you would have ever tried RO at all if you had to pay a fee just to sign up? Personally I think many would just go over to some other Free Game instead of paying money on a "may be a cool game". It is free purely for marketting and expansion purposes. As an MMO there are always players coming in and going out, it is built into the assumed life of the game. The amount of players going out isn't going to change in a good way if we block new account registrations, but the amount coming in certainly will.

Right now lots of manpower "could" solve the problem of those registrations, or we can work on removing what inconveniences they put in place on the players, like the botters, and the shouters. The inconvenience and annoyance they cause players are the #1 issues for us, not the bandwidth or resources of ours that they are using.
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#17 LeonFlare

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Posted 16 September 2011 - 03:35 PM

The start up fee for an account is something that could work, as long as we didn't accept the payment methods that can be charged back, which means using ones that may not be convenient for that player. It also is a significant impact on new user registrations. How many of you would have ever tried RO at all if you had to pay a fee just to sign up? Personally I think many would just go over to some other Free Game instead of paying money on a "may be a cool game". It is free purely for marketting and expansion purposes. As an MMO there are always players coming in and going out, it is built into the assumed life of the game. The amount of players going out isn't going to change in a good way if we block new account registrations, but the amount coming in certainly will.


true, years ago i can´t play in iro because i had no easy way to pay the game, but now with paymo theres no problem anymore :smooch:

pd: fking paymo, they stole me around 10bucks and im still waiting for my WPE -_-
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#18 Wiggles

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Posted 16 September 2011 - 07:16 PM

How many of you would have ever tried RO at all if you had to pay a fee just to sign up? Personally I think many would just go over to some other Free Game instead of paying money on a "may be a cool game".


There was once another MMO called Ryzom (Its open source now I believe). It had a similar Premium system as to what RO has. However, non-premium accounts were not allowed to leave the training grounds. They required a small payment via credit card or phone to be able to leave the training grounds.

However, the training grounds in themselves were not like RO's. You could get a firm grasp of the game, crafting, leveling, skills, weapons, fighting bosses in large team fights, different classes, even a full auction house for the training area only. The training grounds themselves took a good 5-7 days to complete.
You could see that the developers put a LOT and I mean a LOT of time and effort into making these training grounds and engaging the user into them, and I watched from a developers point of view, to see this business genius as player after player enjoyed the training grounds, and paid their little fee to get into the real world.

In this particular game, the real world was utter crap. But, they got their money from you, so their job was done.

The training grounds had invaluable items for the players. But, they were all non-tradeable, excluding some crafting items. All these items were exclusive to the training area, and once in the real world were utterly useless.

But, its a great idea. You would get no Chinese Zeny farming bots any more, and also be able to control the first experience players have of your game.


I told you this suggestion years ago Heim.
It was even coded up on eAthena. Renewal tried to copy it with their skill books and quests in the training grounds, but utterly failed and just tried to tack on features as usual.

Edited by Wiggles, 16 September 2011 - 07:22 PM.

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#19 Kuwano

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Posted 17 September 2011 - 01:44 PM

For spam bots it's actually much easier than that. Long time ago, when I admin'ed and GM'ed my RO server, I've scripted a Guards NPC's who was listening to public chat and muting players for bad words like :smooch:. And of course I could add all necessary words or whole phrases into NPC's database so NPC will mute or teleport players in jail when he hears these words. Why not to do something like this but with certain website addresses in a list of a "bad words".
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#20 Kadnya

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Posted 17 September 2011 - 02:18 PM

For spam bots it's actually much easier than that. Long time ago, when I admin'ed and GM'ed my RO server, I've scripted a Guards NPC's who was listening to public chat and muting players for bad words like :smooch:. And of course I could add all necessary words or whole phrases into NPC's database so NPC will mute or teleport players in jail when he hears these words. Why not to do something like this but with certain website addresses in a list of a "bad words".


The problem is that unlike your RO server where for spam bots looks as profitable as the other thousand of pservers out there, spam bots has a lots of interest in spamming iRO specifically.

Your 'guard npcs' idea is exactly like the current manners.txt bandaid solution, where spambots can just trial and error phrases until one passes the filter. Since there will be humans behind those bots changing their phrases as soon as you update your guard npcs, it turns into a race of updating one side and the other every few minutes.
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#21 Inubashiri

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Posted 17 September 2011 - 02:34 PM

I'd like to meet the programmer who thought manner.txt was a good idea and punch them in the face repeatedly...however on the topic, iRO is not in the business of making major developments like that, that is kRO's job which refuses to address the issue.
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#22 Blubba

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Posted 17 September 2011 - 02:38 PM

Right click on that character - click Reject Whispering - Problem solved
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#23 Forzando

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Posted 17 September 2011 - 04:02 PM

Do spam bots still spam at an incredible impossible speed ? Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't RCX had some feature that blocked incoming chat from bots that spammed rapidly ? GMs could set up a GM-character bot, invisible, that automatically sends a mute or ban request to their system for that particular character. The GM bot would move in a fashion similar to the Ragial bot. Win.

Actually that's just a temporary solution. To that, spammers will just create multiple bots and sit them together, each one spamming very slowly but saying the same thing. Lose. >_>

Edited by Forzando, 17 September 2011 - 04:04 PM.

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#24 Inubashiri

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Posted 17 September 2011 - 04:24 PM

Do spam bots still spam at an incredible impossible speed ? Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't RCX had some feature that blocked incoming chat from bots that spammed rapidly ? GMs could set up a GM-character bot, invisible, that automatically sends a mute or ban request to their system for that particular character. The GM bot would move in a fashion similar to the Ragial bot. Win.

Actually that's just a temporary solution. To that, spammers will just create multiple bots and sit them together, each one spamming very slowly but saying the same thing. Lose. >_>


Last I heard, and I don't know if its true because I don't use RCX, but some of them managed to by pass that.

Do you really want a GM automaton going around unchecked swinging the mute/ban hammer then having to send in a ticket and wait to get it fixed? I don't know about anyone else but I like the feeling of having a human being swinigng the banhammer rather than an AI that can foul up and go berserk.
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#25 Wiggles

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Posted 17 September 2011 - 05:50 PM

Last I heard, and I don't know if its true because I don't use RCX, but some of them managed to by pass that.


RCX has a word filter too similar to the manner.txt, instead it checks on receiving the message instead of sending it. So its easily bypassable. (Except that if a user updates their own filter, the spammers don't know what to bypass, with the manner.txt they can easily open the GRF and see what words need to be changed)

Still none have bypassed the flood protection filter though. I can run through Valk and there is no spam at all with it up.
Although, its possible they can. Eventually they will. They will turn to PMing and Chat windows. But PM's can be filtered too. Chat windows are much less intrusive.


The fight has not even begun yet. GM's if you think you are winning, you are blind.
Even if you ban every single account that has dirty zeny and somehow filter the chat, they are gonna start bypassing it in other ways.

Eg, making their character name "Goldsellers.com" and spamming random words in chat, that no word filter can pick up.
Storing player names in a database, and have bots constantly pm'ing people. So they can spam them not just in pront but everywhere.
Mail spamming people constantly.
Who knows what else.

Edited by Wiggles, 17 September 2011 - 05:56 PM.

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