Dear forum community, There is a bit of an annoying issue that has been going for the past 6 years.. People tend to report hackers via the chatbox: as Opposed to: Many people ignore server rules, forum rules, posting rules or generally speaking - Being Ignorant! Ignorance causes trouble, some people are being banned for NX abuse, some for other rule breakings. But the hacker situation is a bit different, reporting a hacker in the CHATBOX is actually assisting the hacker, making them evade bans as most of them run on virtual machines thus making IP bans impossible. They use the simple build in commands of "CTRL + F" type in "Hacker" and go through chatbox much faster, straight to the information that is valuable to their ban evasion. Making the game, much less enjoyable. Most of these issues, are caused by players' ignorance. Ignorance of reading the rules. I would like to see the community become more efficient and rule acknowledged, creating the perfect platform to a not good, but a GREAT community. I would like to purpose a change to the chatbox system, this one is the first suggestion out of many other to come. People who report a hacker, or dishonor any other rule, especially when it is red bold above chatbox should be temporarily prohibited from using it. Block should be lifted, ones they pass a test that goes through each and every forum rule. EXAMPLE: RULES LINK will redirect to terms and conditions. **Reporting hackers in chatbox should be added as term. TEST LINK will redirect to a short / long test. SUBMITING the correct answers will lift the ban the the player shown a proof of being acknowledged where the rules are and how to obey them. All possible questions for test are for the Staff members do decide. Post your opinion, it matters! Hope some of you will see the beauty behind it. Cheers and have an awesome chatbox session!
This is just pure overkill. From our end we can just delete the message containing the hacker's IGN. I think that's better than having to go through all these unnecessary process. We have to be a little more understanding that English isn't every player's native language, and even if it is, maybe they just panicked and wanted to bring to our attention that there's a cheater around and failed to read the shoutbox's MOTD. Voting no for this.
Could just be something less severe as well. Like if you try posting a comment containing the word "hack", "hacker" or "hacking", you will get a pop-up saying something along the lines of "Keep in mind, shoutbox is not for reporting players. Do you still wish to comment?". Just in case you want to mention hacking in some way without reporting someone, like I'm doing now. It will also give a reminder of the rule without going too overboard
I can definitely UPVOTE such a solution. Supplying the link to report section in the popup is also a great idea.
Unfortunately this is not possible as we have no control over the shoutbox plugin since it's not done by us. However in our upcoming forum (yes, you heard it right! we're due for some update soontm), Kevin has developed a shoutbox from scratch which will give us 100% control over such scenarios. For now, we can only make do with what we have.
OPAAA!!! finally!!! Hope to see it soon, also hope to see private message rooms as an option in the v2.0 chatbox . As this was going to be my next suggestion. @Kai
I don't think private message room will be a thing. In any case, I'm championing for shoutbox to be entirely removed since we have Discord now, but Staff have pointed out that there are still players who are using the shoutbox. We'll see again in due time.
Don't see a reason why enforcing people's good intentions against them. I know this can be annoying to see in the shout box but bare in mind that some people are just too lazy to to capture evidence, upload, crop (videos) if necessary, open a topic, follow a certain format, etcetera. I'm not saying you should do it in the shout box, I'm just saying that it's better than not doing anything. P.S: Are there any plans for the return of the autoban?
"I'm not saying you should do it in the shout box, I'm just saying that it's better than not doing anything." Not doing anything does less damage than letting the hackers see they are being reported. Thats the whole point. Report in chatbox = Assist a hacker. Same way if a hacker would tell you "Yo, can you help me transfer 1k onyx apples? ill give you 100 for free for help" You would agree out of good intentions, applied you dont know its a hacker. But eventually you would just help them commit their filthy farming and diming. @bluehammer
Let's try to think from the perspective of Hackers. If you were one, would you not transfer the hack earnings and wait until your IGN randomly shows up on shoutbox? That would be dumb since the ban hammer can fall anytime and no one can anticipate when that will happen. Any 3 digit IQ hackers would empty their illegit earnings on regular basis, not necessarily when they discover that they were reported. The only real advantage Hackers can gain from spotting their IGNs on shoutbox is having the little time to avoid field arrest by logging off/hiding their chars. However, once a hacker is spotted and their sophisticated IGNs (e.g jjjjjjjji82) are written down, one can safely deduce that they are gone for good. It would also take more effort to constantly scan shoutbox for their daily-renewed, complex IGNs than to just ignore the random reports and invest the same time to run more clients. Using a smega to expose hackers' IGNs is definitely a bad idea since the hackers, who are probably playing on their legit chars at the time, can react immediately without extra effort. Everyone should refrain from doing this.
Most of the hackers I encountered (a lot) were never on the PC actively playing, all automatically changed channels. I highly doubt a player who's hacking is going to sit in front of the shout box reading if his name is there. Why would he waste his time there, what's the point? If someone's hacking then it means he/she doesn't care about that account/about MapleRoyals as a whole. Uhh no. All I'm saying is: You are trying to punish the people who are trying to help. It's wrong. Just think of getting the autoban working properly and this problem wouldn't be here in the first place. It's a thing that should be on every server, in every game. Forum banning people wouldn't help the problem.
There are many open source, completely free tools that search for a defined list of words inside the chatbox (in this situation). They don't read the chatbox, they have the tool that warns them once it detects a specific keyword. 2020 guys... Isn't that hard to automate stuff. I have developed so many automated bots, tools, heck even military management tools. Not so hard and works wonders. I still think a pop-up with report link is the best option possible, keyword detection based. Regarding ban appeals and hacker reports.
no. kinda understand and agree with many that try to post the igns just to alert GM (although is not helpfull in all case and apparently not allowed aswell ) i know there is report system on forum but the process is so time consuming to make a proper report when bunch of them quick CC or run away automatically when normal player gets near i think is clear sign that we need faster and safe way for reporting-alerting GM's about ToS breakers, don't know why the ingame report system dosn't work maybe a command like @GM < ToS breaking reasons + ign> where only GM's can see that message
I doubt most hackers would even check the shoutbox. I also doubt that they're even in front of their computer when hacking.
I wonder if chatbox can have a function where a prefix code sends a message only to admins and GMs. Like "~GM: methcoffee is hacking at ant tunnel ch 2". Abusers of this function can get a ban from using this code.
I think we just need an easier way of reporting hackers. With so many GM's at the moment, surely there is at least one GM on most of the time. We should be able to just alert a GM in game and they can come to the map and deal with the hacker. There should be no need for collecting video evidence, and no need for spamming in the shoutbox.
