Why is no one policing this?

[Azryn]

I mean cmon.

I know the bots are a plague right now, and difficult to remove completely from game.

But you guys know how serious they are right now, so why would you not have someone policing forums regularly for this shit?

Forums are much easier to manage than game.

Even if it is just deleting threads and banning users.

It is so simple to do.

Hell, just hire some damn volunteer forum mods.

I'd do it, for Christ's sake. God knows I have a shitton of experience in it.

 

[Azryn]

Or at least allow us to block users.

[nestharus]

Cool your horses. This happens every night at this time. Mods will be on in a bit to start deleting the threads and banning all the bots.

[khynnea]

I don't understand why the forum software isn't sophisticated enough to handle a large portion of this itself. Too frequent postings, posting spam/garbage... high quality email filters do a better job.

[Azryn]

1 minute ago, nestharus said:

Cool your horses. This happens every night at this time. Mods will be on in a bit to start deleting the threads and banning all the bots.

 

If it happens every night, then why not preempt it?

Or put measure in place to allow us to block users, report users, to stop people posting too often etc.

This could be easily fixed.

[Medicine]

2 minutes ago, nestharus said:

Cool your horses. This happens every night at this time. Mods will be on in a bit to start deleting the threads and banning all the bots.

...Are you seriously trying to defend this?

[Azryn]

It's a bit of a joke now.

All day today, I had all bot matches in the arena.

Bots in my big 4 dungeons.

Bots on forums.

Bots in chats.

 

And I thought it was bad on release with chat spammers.

[bug]

There's like 2 active CMs on this forum. I'm guessing they're off right now. So we have this.

[Kuz]

poor game getting out of hand.. i see more bots than ppl nowadays

[Azryn]

1 minute ago, bug said:

There's like 2 active CMs on this forum. I'm guessing they're off right now. So we have this.

 

Yeah. That's why I suggested they hire some forum mods.

Very limited abilities.

Literally just deleting threads, posts and possibly banning.

[Naisho]

I'm pretty sure they are policing this. Not effectively enough. At first when there was only a few bot threads it would be deleted. The rate now is clearly greater than the manpower they possess. Banning bots and deleting threads are not enough to keep bots down. They just need to come up with more efficient methods to do so, there are plenty. If they happen to find acceptable suggestions in forums and implement them it will be better. If they choose to solve it themselves, it is still fine. But currently there seems to be only banning and deleting which does not show much result.

[khynnea]

10 minutes ago, Naisho said:

I'm pretty sure they are policing this. Not effectively enough. At first when there was only a few bot threads it would be deleted. The rate now is clearly greater than the manpower they possess. Banning bots and deleting threads are not enough to keep bots down. They just need to come up with more efficient methods to do so, there are plenty. If they happen to find acceptable suggestions in forums and implement them it will be better. If they choose to solve it themselves, it is still fine. But currently there seems to be only banning and deleting which does not show much result.

 

Which is why I asked about forum software and filtering tools. Don't these things exist to stop repeated posts within certain time frames, technologies that require identification of humans vs. bots (I know captcha stinks but there are others that may work), or even forcing someone to enter their pin to post.

Not to mention simple filtering of SPAM like in high end enterprise email servers. NCSoft is a big corporation. Surely they have spam filters somewhere ... and can repurpose the filtering on the forums. Or buy something. Or get better forum software.

[Naisho]

technically, (with my small amount of programming knowledge) I don't think it's that easy. You see how the bots use weird symbols? It's to bypass most filters. It would be difficult to make a program to efficiently filters all of them out. (at least with my minimal knowledge)

[Whimsicalalien]

Did the moderators go on a holiday?

[Killian]

Seems no one is on shift until whenever EU hours are then it all vanishes by 2 or 3 am my time.

[TheRealElvis]

It's not about holidays, this is extremely aggressive anyways. And if NC can't sort this botting out both ingame and on forums, the game is as good as dead by the end of march.

[kemoT]

[TheRealElvis]

Because they can't. Bots are made quicker and in larger quantities than they are moderated. This disease is the end of B&S, soon the majority of popoulation are bots, not players.

[nestharus]

Moderators to the rescue! Forums have been purged of the bot scourge >: O

[Hime]

Sorry guys. I was out for night and didn't get to check. I'm usually here refreshing the forums while I chill at home for the evening. 

 

We are working on long term preventative measures and additional moderation help. Thanks for bearing with us

 

While I am home now, I gotta wash the dishes!

[xArinx]

No matter what you do, how hard you try, if people are willing to do crap like this, they will break through every defense you put up.

 

The best thing you could do is have a account registration screen, where every registration needs to be monitored and checked by an actual person and approved off before being able to post. But even then, people will then just try to make bots natural instead.

 

You can always say it's easy to prevent stuff like this, but to people who do this says pretty much says the same thing. Do whatever you want, it's easy to break in.

 

There are mods who monitors the forums, they can't be here 24/7 to monitor everything. Even if you say get unpaid volunteers, they could be assholes who will abuse their mod privileges, then they would have to screen every person who applies. But no sane experienced person will work for free unless it's once a week or whenever you want, that means you gotta get dozens of people and hand over forum backdoor keys or pay people, which is just a waste of money.

 

This happened a couple times before, it only took a few hours for all the spam to be gone.

[khynnea]

I appreciate (and regret) that employees will moderate from home on "free" time. I hated it when things would break and I'd have to step up and deal with systems and failures from home or vacation and basically had no days or time off for ... well, years. I'd just like that not to be the answer.

 

I realize even with the best of filtering and administrative systems there will be failures, but one would hope not on the consistent and repeatable order of what we're seeing; which is why I said I'd be happy to have to enter my pin or go through the same degree of rigor to post as I do to play the game. Or something equivalent -- I haven't been "in the field" for a while so I don't know what would be required to actually be a deterrent -- or if it really does taken moderators. I just know that anything that requires headcount isn't likely to be deemed a viable long term solution, and I don't think companies typically like to outsource to the public/volunteers for legal reasons.

[Naekuh]

someone send Hime a starbucks card so she can go out and get coffee...

 

I have a feeling its gona be one hell of a long night for her.  

[Arohk]

do they not realize hat people in NA/EU are unlikely to read korean?

they are just pissing of people instead of making actual advertisement.

[ElectricLyn]

17 minutes ago, Arohk said:

do they not realize hat people in NA/EU are unlikely to read korean?

they are just pissing of people instead of making actual advertisement.

They don't care. In fact, they just came back. This is just so out of hand.