I Think My Spam Filter is Getting Dumber
I, like a great many people using Wordpress, use Akismet for my spam protection. I’ve been noticing a problem recently though. It’s letting through things, more than once, which I have already filtered out as spam. This is annoying.
Not so say it isn’t a great filter, it still is, as it blocks hundreds of comments each day (and has never blocked a legitimate comment to my knowledge) but the ones that get through just seem like such a pain.
Where do MMOs come in to this picture? Primarily in thinking about how to detract from in-game spam (of gold, or power leveling services, etc.). I’m not sure how to go about it. My problem is, you see, not that I don’t have an idea on systems that could be put in place (beyond what any of the current games are doing) but that I can’t think of a system that is inherently beyond being overcome in a relatively short time.
I started using Akismet when this blog first went up. That’s just over a year now. In that time some comments are already starting to slip through the cracks. Spammers are not stupid people (or the people creating the bots doing the spamming, depending on what it happens to be.)
I’ve noticed this trend for a long time in my time administrating/moderating communities as well. As soon as you implement something meant to stop spammers it works for a short time and then they circumvent that and you are back to square one.
So, how can we combat this in an MMOG? Giving it some thought the best I could come up with was spam filters (similar to an Akismet or any other type of spam filter) is applied inside your chat system. Any messages that are considered “spam” by the computer system are filtered out so they are never seen by the general audience of your game but it will still show for the spammers. This would be similar to an “auto ignore” feature built into the chat system.
Text that the filter is unsure of would be sent through once and could then be “reported” by players as spam. After it reaches a certain threshold of reports it flags all additional messages in that same auto ignore bank.
Similarly players could report any message that slipped through the cracks as just a normal message and it could be then removed as spam and flagged as ignore. (I’ll ignore for the moment the obvious useful administrative options that this would give any CSR as far as reports go.)
Of course this isn’t flawless by any means. The system could be abused by players, and will be, no doubt. But, I think adding in an auto filter for chat is the next logical step to take. Pure reporting works fine for a while, but as games get bigger, and the business of breaking the rules of those games get bigger, we need to find different ways to attack it.
Just some random things I was thinking about, back to your business now.
December 13th, 2007 at 11:18 pm
I’ve noticed over the last few days the same thing. Trying to keep up with comments, and thinking I may need to respond, all I find is that I can get a great deal on a dvd player, unbeatable rate on a guaranteed credit card, or a bigger penis.
December 14th, 2007 at 10:19 am
Not exactly, but close enough, you described EQ2’s spam filter from the user’s point of view.
It works on both tells and in-game mail.
December 14th, 2007 at 11:09 am
Doug,
Thanks for the comment. I haven’t gotten any comments like that, most of mine are for varying degrees of disgusting porn (oh, they are all sick, but some much more so than others seemingly by the description.)
Scott,
Thanks for commenting. I know some of what I mentioned was used in other games but I wasn’t aware of what EQ2 was doing. I haven’t played in a few months but last time I was back in EQ2 I got a pretty decent amount of spam (via in game mail mostly) that was in need of being reported.
My big problem is not so much with spam getting through, annoying as that is, it is with “obvious” spam getting through.
Especially on various forum/blog softwares I’ve noticed a disturbing lack of ability for the software to determine a spam comment/post which always makes me question what exactly these filters.
Examples of “obvious” spam, from a web perspective and not an MMO, would be male enhancement, porn, comments with many linked words, complete gibberish names, etc. Why does the software not pick up on the topic of the content (like Google Ads would do) and immediately flag, at least for moderation, anything obviously off the beaten path.
I suppose to some extent for both web and MMO it is a matter of performance trade-off needed to implement such a system. You don’t want to bog down or use up resources running filters on chat people can ignore when you can put that to performance in other areas but then again, maybe that isn’t a primary concern, not knowing how exactly MMO performance is optimized or in what way the networking/servers are running it is hard to say if this would be important.
I suppose, theoretically at least, running all conversation through a central chat server (or several, obviously) would help as the system as a whole could learn from reported spam. Of course, that is kind of what Akismet is supposed to be doing, which begs the question are there a number of people who are not flagging messages as spam that I am causing the system to get worse?