I did a search and didn't find this info. Let me know if it's a repeat.

Are you tired of the Peons bugging you? Power-leveling offers got ya down? Well, we have the cure!

First up, and my first love in this battle: SpamSentry. This little gem blocks most whispers from the buggers. The current version, however, they are working around by sending multiple tells at the same time. One gets caught, but one gets through. This add-on makes it a breeze for you to report the offending parties. Two clicks and your ticket is submitted with all details. This also has a feature that adds a "Spam" button to your mailbox. If you get a spam, click the button and it's added to the report list.

Secondly, and after only one day of using this, I disabled SpamSentry but for the mail "Spam" button, is STFU. The name might be bad, but like Chuck Norris, sometimes bad is good. STFU will /who anyone the first time they whisper you during a session. If they're below the threshold level (default=2), then their whispers never make it to your screen. It clears its blacklist at each logout, so it won't permanently block a genuine player. I installed this before my playing last night, and during our SL run, I was the only one who didn't seem to get the whispers everyone else did.
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ETA: Lochnar pointed out that anyone who wants a /ginvite who is level 1 would be ignored by STFU. I did some code-digging and found out where to change the .lua to put this feature in. Thanks to Frost for helping me test it.
(These are PC iinstructions. I don't know how to get there on a Mac.)
Step 1: Install STFU to your ~\Interface\AddOns\ folder in your WoW directory.
Step 2: Go to the ~\Interface\AddOns\STFU\ directory.
Step 3: Right-click STFU.lua and select Open With... then select WordPad and click Ok.
Step 4: In the WordPad window, hit Ctrl+F and enter "for whispers" in the box, click Find Next, then Cancel.
Step 5: Below the line that reads:

replace the following line:

with this code:

Step 6: Hit Ctrl+S to save your work, and close the window.

You can now start WoW and the AddOn will automatically block all level 1 characters who whisper you unless they:

• Are in your guild
• Are in your party or raid
• Are on your friends list
• Are (for some reason) a <GM>
• Use the string "invite" in their whisper

This should make this AddOn friendly for those who have the rank to /ginvite people.

Just a couple comments - I'm using spamsentry and have had no problem with it not catching the second on the duplicate spam sends. My only complaint is that I wish more GMs would recognize the ticket as auto-generated by spamsentry (some apparently do) and send back their auto-response instead of whispering me so I have to stop and send back "nothing to discuss - just reporting gold spam". STFU sounds really interesting but I would be afraid of it not doing what I expected it to. Immediately, I see that it would be a problem with new alts wanting invites to a guild. The first thing I do is whisper a guildmate asking for the invite and this would block it. Not everyone would be aware that it might happen and be offended when they got back the message they had been blocked. I would love to see another review after you've used it for a couple weeks. It does sound nice.

I don't know why I was getting the messages that way thru SS. Maybe my version needs updated or I'm getting a conflict with another add-on. I put in my default report that they need not contact me in game, but I think that some GMs whisper the player before they actually read the ticket. It depends on the GM.

I thought about the level 1 alts not getting thru, but I am not of rank to invite anyway. I see how this could be a problem for those who can, though. I looked thru the readme.txt and didn't find a setting to check for keywords to override the ignore function.

...

I did some code digging and figured out an easy way to modify STFU to let whispers with the word "invite" in them thru. I'll ETA my original post.

Off-topic, but... you'll what your original post? I only know of that standing for "Estimated Time of Arrival"...

On-topic, Spamsentry (written by a friend of an ex-guildmate, gogo fame!) has worked fine for me, even with the double-whispers. Haven't had any false positives yet.

I just got WRUGS the other day and it's been great. It automatically blocks all whispers from anyone not on your friends list, in your guild, in your party/raid or on your safe list. If someone not on your safe list whispers you, their whisper is blocked and a reply is sent to them with something along these lines:

"Hi! <name> is using WRUGS anti-spam addon. In order for <name> to see your tells, type /w <name> WRUGS."

The person does this, is permanently added to your safe list an life goes on. Of the 10 or so invites I got for instance runs since getting it, nearly all of the people have asked where I got it.

That sounds pretty nice, even for someone like me that plays with a lot of people not in my guild. Takes someone two seconds to get through the spam filter if they aren't in my guild, and I wouldn't get all that spam. Seems like I'm up to one an hour now .

I'd heard of various blockers but the day I logged on and received 4 tells in 54 minutes (I checked my TitanBar session time after the fourth tell) was the last straw for me. My server (Maiev) is currently the 3rd lowest server population for all US servers... the business can't be that great.

About a month ago there was a mass spam on Sunday morning I think, but it wasn't gold selling, it was some emo poem. I forgot the screenshot it, but it was really odd. I'm not sure what was worse, gold sellers or emo poems

Edit To Amend/Add

XD I think I read about that on LJ's worldofwarcraft community.

Ummmm.... as soon as this becomes a little more popular it will be useless. It'd be trivial to code the spam bot to /w <name> WRUGS and then spam you.

I use CrepSpamFilter. Was made by a guild mate of mine. I like the simplicity and unobtrusiveness of it, and it works quite nicely. I just hide the "CSF" behind my FuBar.

Actually... no. The password and message can be custom set. I'd love to see a bot figure this out:

"Hi! <name> is using WRUGS anti-spam addon. In order for <name> to see your tells, whisper <name> with the answer to this problem: 1+2+3."

I've started using SpamSentry. It seems to work quite well. It was, however, giving me a notification every time it blocked something. This was almost as disruptive as the spam itself. A little fiddling with the options fixed that.

Picked up WRUGS and had ~7 people yesterday (who had sent me a whisper) tell me, that after the initial WTH reaction wore off, they were going to DL it. Thanks for the link.

~Frag

Oooh... very cool. *heads off to download WRUGS now*

How exactly do you change the message? I haven't been able to find any way to do that.

/wrugs setpass [New Pass]

(per the readme, not sure about changing the Auto-response to a blocked member, may have to tinker with the lua.)

Cheers,
~Frag

Yes, I know about the password, I was asking about the message. Best thing you can do is hide the password, apparently, but that sort of makes it pointless...

Tinker in the .lua

It didn't take me long to find... I'm currently at work or I'd look again and give you a general idea of where to look

EDIT: Just remembered, I've had some weird occurrences of whispers getting through. They generally go something like this:

[Lolrogue]: wanna tank underbog???
[Me]: no thanks
[Lolrogue]: WRUGS
/me is confused.

Their message got through, but WRUGS obviously detected it and then sent its response...

I poked around in the lua -- if you've used WRUGS and know how it works I don't think it is very hard.

However, I had to delete it. I got all kinds of errors with WRUGS. I don't have any chat mods installed, with the exception of Suicide Kings, which I suppose could be causing a conflict.

Hmm wonder what is doing it for you. WRUGS works fine for me and I have a couple of mods that mess with chat stuff installed. I don't think it's SK since I've got that too.

Isn't ratingbuster also throwing errors for you?

I downloaded WRUGS too and don't have errors popping up with it, SK nor ratingbuster. I wonder if you've conflicting library/libraries somewhere that is/are included in a mod somewhere.

Not very comfortable with tinkering in .lua files. I'm not exactly what you'd call an expert on the subject.

Besides, I'd have to do the same all over again at every upgrade... meh. No thanks.

You don't need to tinker to get use out of it. Bots aren't currently responding to it and won't for quite a while. Once they do, I'd be surprised if the makers didn't put in easy funtionality to change the message.

Not true. One message at least is consistently getting through since I installed it.

My personal favorite is SpamMeNot, which allows you to block tells by character level, which eliminates the level 1 gold seller spam. It also rates tells by their content, and any tell that exceeds the threshold is blocked and the user ignored. I've been using it for about a week and have seen absolutely no tells involving gold selling, down from the 20-30 a day I was getting before.

SpamMeNot can be found at http://wow-en.curse-gaming.com/downloads/a...chat/spammenot/ .

Good news, everyone!

It will be interesting to see how this affects those that like to dump combat stats from some of the add ons.

Yeah, and the !gem addons, etc.

I'm hoping blizzard will be concerned with false positives so they've taken that into account. Then again, I'm not entirely certain how effective their measures will be, for that reason. The reporting is nice, but after the fact - most goldspammers will whisper you once and that's it, so putting them on ignore doesn't help.

Well the ignore does put the entire account on ignore. So they can't hit you from that account multiple times which does happen a lot. Make the toon, spam, delete toon, make new toon spam. At leas this way that new toon will be on ignore. Right now it's not. So that does help. I've wanted an ignore account feature for awhile now. Hopefully you can manually ignore a whole account without having to do the spam report stuff.

Ace addons like GemList are smart and should be completely unaffected (they already throttle). Worst case scenario is Blizzard's limits are more strict than ChatThrottleLib, so the library needs to be updated to a new limit.

Assuming Blizzard did it right, it'll be a queue system where you can do something like spam 10 entries on a DPS meter and #10 will just be broadcast slower than #1 was.

By the way, I installed STFU when this post started and over the last few weeks I've noticed more and more whispers getting through from gold spammers. Ironically I checked each one that made it through and they were all level 1 characters that should have been blocked. So just FYI, apparently they're finding ways around that one.

One would think that it's not in a spammer's best interest to spend time circumventing people who are actively avoiding ads for their products. I don't imagine that people who install gold-spam-avoiding mods are likely to be swayed by any spam that gets through.

That's odd. I haven't gotten any since I installed this. I know they're still coming at me because I just got a new keyboard that has a little LCD screen on it that shows me who whispered me when they do. Most of the ones I see on the LCD don't show up on the computer and are ones I suspect are spammers (3 whispers from Shjsdfa, etc.). I did have to shut off the SpamSentry for everything but the Spam button on my mailbox (for the same reasons STFU doesn't work with WIM) because otherwise both addons try to parse the whispers and it screws it up. If you have any other chat addons, that may be your problem.

Actually that's the only chat addon I've got. (that I know of) Although I think I may still have quickheal installed and just not working and that did do some whispering when I was healing someone. I'll have to uninstall that and see if it affects it at all.

Seemed like I'd only get one a night and I figured it was a similar issue with duplicate whispers hitting and one getting through. Last night I got three at the same time from a level 1 character so I'm not so sure about that anymore.

Hi,


Yep. But your argument assumes that gold spammers have at least the intelligence of a flatworm. I question the validity of that assumption

--Pete

Ok, I'm convinced it is a conflict now. Last night I was playing with my wife and she was on the main computer and I was on the laptop. With few exceptions the addons are the same and she got the gold spammer whispers and I didn't. We both have STFU loaded so there's gotta be a conflict.