The game can filter out words, so the domain names are probably on that filter. For example, when discussing the recent lawsuit against a certain gold farming company, none of my tells in guildchat which used the company name were heard by others.

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Yea, they must be filtering based on known domain names.

Blizz's spam-fighting techniques have certainly been effective. It used to be intolerable, and now I barely notice ANY spamming.

However, now I think the spammers have moved on to hijacking existing accounts to spam from. That's why you see so many keylogger sites on the forums now. If these crooked fucks would just use their ingenuity for good rather than evil, they'd probably make themselves rich.

I always accept the raid invites whenever I get them so I can spam my own macro. Mine explains that goldbuying isn't allowed, and that the spammers are probably just trying to steal their money or account, and then I explain some basic security concepts. Take that, Hfdaskkjfd! If that IS your real name...

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That filter makes it so hard for me to advertise my blog @ http://sealofblood.scvs4hire.com

Obviously because of the scvs4hire part, as it was taken by me in jest of the whole World of Starcraft announcement everyone was thinking (which turned out to be SC2)

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The whole idea is to raise the cost of gold to such levels that nobody in their right mind would consider buying it. When gold is 100g/$10 it's expensive. When it's 100g/$35 it's insane.

Every time Blizzard takes concrete steps against the spammers, it hits them right in the wallet. When they decide the cost of doing business is too high, we'll have a spam-free WoW.

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The new reporting mechanism stopped the whispers very well. However, on Zangamarsh, I have been getting a lot of group invites that are more annoying than the psts. At first, I declined but it came back immediately. Then I just left it there and it eventually wen't away. Last night, though, I had a perpetual group invite pane on my screen as it went away and came back again very soon.

Now we need an automatic reporting mechanism for group invites that stops subsequent ones.

I have not had this happen on my main server, Khaz'goroth.

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They should create a automatic reject invite unless you have received a tell from that person.

with the current tell blocking, and the fact that I cancel any group invite from someone who won't even say hi to me before inviting.

I got no worries...

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I haven't gotten any whispers until last night- I got about 4. But the weird thing is they were either blank or missing chunks of text. Either the farmer didn't know what he was doing or Blizz is up to something.

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There are addons who block invites, easily downloaded from http://www.curse-gaming.com...

unfortunatly there are still those 10-day tryout cards witch you can buy in stores or get from new wow-boxes witch gives goldspammers at least one whole day to spam ppl on as many servers as they can before they get banned. There is no way to get rid of these more than to make blizzard stop selling and giving away those cards, becouse you cant do buissnies if you have to spend money on an account that gets banned within 24 hours...

new anti-keylogging -programs will come up soon since it has become such a problem with bank, creditcard and wow-passwords getting stolen by ppl who post fake sites witch makes you computer download trojans. They even make addon-packs on different sites and hides a trojan in it. some trojans are homemade and cannot be found by any virusprotection-system untill someone notice them, witch might take all from 1 hour to a week, depending on if ppl know what to look for.

its a creepy way to make money, but some ppl do anything to get easy money. watch out for fake porn-sites and wow-sites...

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I always accept the raid invites, and then sit there, telling everyone who gets invited to Report Spam when the bot does it. Sabotage. Lately I've seen them in Stormwind, they just stand in the middle of the Trade District spamming in /say. I again, get everyone to Report them, and then I'll put them on /follow, and send them a bunch of group invites, to see if they'll accept.

Have you noticed all the pervy spambots are ALWAYS level 1 human FEMALE warriors?

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disguising urls with *'s or other characters is a fairly common spamming ploy
Blizzard probably employs several filters that picks up on urls in all chat channels and displaying it outright makes it hard for the filters to pick it up

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It is strange, they now chat with you when delivering. Very strange, they also have you send a message COD to get the cash.

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I'd like to see a change to the group invites so that we see the screenname of who's inviting you. That way we can ignore it if it's not someone we know, and if it keeps coming back up, mark it as spam.

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@11

Ya, blizzard will red flag when someone from some account just send you a large amount of money or even small chunks of money when you never interacted with them. So spaming in /whispers is a bypass they do to prevent the two accounts (sender and receiver), so that blizzard takes them as friends or whatever.

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Maybe it's just me, but I purposely accept those group invites for the express pleasure of reporting the spammer. For Azeroth!

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I read this via the RSS feed... and got an ad for a gold trading company bundled in. Oh the irony. :P

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When invited to one of their raids (only works if the farmer is in town and when playing a hunter), try going to war with cenarion hold then misdirecting the Cenarion Emmissary to them, great fun.

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Blizz's own built-in spam protection + addons FTW

just go grab an addon that ignores... well... everything from level 1 characters (i ignore up to level 3 personally, sometimes they get clever)

I see so little spam anymore, and that makes me a glad panda

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I've been really happy with the reduction in gold spam. I also often join the groups that i'm invited to and spam my own macro about the purchase of gold being against the TOS, blah blah. Hopefully some little kid gets nervous and changes his mind NOT to buy gold.

I get more upset at the people who buy the gold than I do at the farmers. Some asian kid is paid to do something less awful than he was doing before ONLY BECAUSE there is a market for the gold.

I think more pressure, as in social pressure, should be put on people who purchase the gold, including public ridicule.

I would totally purchase fruit from Cro Threadstrong's mortal enemy to pelt a convicted "goldbuyer"'s charater stuck in the Stockades of Shame (to be invented) in the middle of Shatt. People would be free to emote all over the shamed goldbuyer. Hell we could get a raidgroup together to shame someone 40-man style.

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As a side note you should not accept random raid invites.

I believe there is a technique whereby someone could "steal" your instance IDs and use them for personal gain.

I won't go into specifics but just say that it's not a good idea to accept the invites even if just to report them when you are spammed.

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@19 I haven't heard of that before, do you happen to have a link or anything where I could read up on the specifics? I may have to stop accepting those invites now.

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