New anti-spam system

[AnonDuck]

As some of you may have noticed there is a new anti-spam system in place. Some people are being caught off guard by it, so I'll explain a bit how it works.

A non-technical summary:
don't repeat.
don't repeat. It hates this.
DON'T SHOUT. It hates this too.
DONT SHOUT AND REPEAT. It *REALLY* hates this.

If you are not shouting or repeating, is is highly unlikely you will trigger the anti-spam system. The system will always warn you if you are about to be banned, so you have a chance to slow down.


The gory details:
If you type more than 8 lines in 10 seconds, you will get a warning. 10 lines in 10 seconds and you will get a ban. This is for both public and whisper combined.

There is also some lameness checking involved to help keep the signal to noise ratio decent. A repeat of the previous line counts as three lines. This means if you are repeating, you only have 4 lines in 10 seconds before you get a ban.

Additionally, a line that is mostly caps or excessive punctuation also counts as 3 lines. This stacks upon the previous checks.

So for example if you were to shout "ITEMS PLS!!!!!" twice in a row, your count would be up to a whopping 6 lines. Do it once more and you are up to 12 lines, which means you have just earned a ban.

Currently a spam ban lasts 1 hour.

Edit:
Trades also go through this system now. They are worth 3 lines.

[Jumpy]

I just love this !!!

thanks

[Wombat]

I can tolerate it if an hour is an hour and not 8 hours. If GMs are still open to event organizers requests for global announcements, it will avoid problems with enthusiastic players attempting to get people to show up and then getting banned at a crucial moment. This has happened to people (including myself) before Master Kenobi accepted the suggestion that announcements for scheduled events could request a GM "global announcement" for the scheduled event.

On this same vein of thought, I would think 3 days as a good amount of time for an event request to receive GM assistance on global announcements, though I don't think there should (or could) be a hard rule necessarily. I also think scheduling the event in "player talk" with an [Event] tag would bring attention to the GMs. Obviously if GMs are busy or not online, this wouldn't work and I wouldn't feel bad if a GM couldn't help me.

[Terwarf]

Thanks a lot! The World got much more peaceful...