Recently Baradar67 and I were having a chat regarding someone who was spamming and using special characters (the ones that show up as "???" in chat logs). We've came across that certain chat rules are not clearly/well stated. Advertising: From a bit of research, in the Wiki, there's nowhere that states how long a player should wait to next advertise their (insert whatever) from their previous run of advertisements. I also believe it doesn't clearly state if the use of alternate accounts is allowed for advertising the same thing, or if another player advertises your (insert whatever) for you.- In the Rules tab it states; Source Rule 6. - Although this is the only area where you can find information on how advertising should be held inside the game. Usage of Special Characters: The issues with these types of characters is that some may not know what could be considered a "special/external character" or if they're allowed to use them. There should be a section in which a majority/all of the special characters are laid out for the player to view before typing a message in which they have a concern on if it's one of these characters (most likely is if they're concerned about it, although wouldn't double check/care; needs a bit more enforcing). The main issue with this is that it comes up in logs as a bunch of "???", which can obviously cause major issues if suspects don't/can't supply screenshots of what has happened.- In the Rules tab it states; Source Rule 6. - This is helpful, but only if you truly care about what you're putting in chat and know the difference between what is an external character and what isn't. Most believe that if you can put it in chat, it's fine to use, not if it's on a standard keyboard.- Not only is this revision needed with more enforcement and clearer/"out there" stated for players to notice and take consideration towards, but it can be quite annoying and/or and an eye-sore for some people to view these characters.- Suggested by JackBiggin (Source); To disallow all characters that aren't on a standard keyboard to prevent the "???" from showing up in Console Language Barriers, Suggested/Brought-Up by Bro_im_infinite (Source): In the rules it tells us that languages other than English are seen as spam. This can be seen as moderately offensive to those who know very little English to understand that, or can use Google translate. This should probably be moved to it's own rule and the remark of caling it "spam" removed.- In the Rules tab it states; Source Rule 6. - Not everyone can speak enough English to properly chat with others, so when they do try in their native tongue and their muted it can be seen as offensive. In most cases those who don't speak English don't speak at all, so when this happens they might see it as a shock and/or leave for "discrimination" (This word is being used very loosely)- Someone just reading the rules can see this as offensive, whether or not they have a native tongue other than English If anyone has any questions about my concerns with the current way chat rules are explained please leave a comment and I'll evaluate it. If it's a good enough argument I'll edit this thread to either include that new concern or edit an existing one. Please take into consideration that this is in the Discussion section and not a Suggestion, as it's not a coding-based update I believe it should be in the Discussions.
If alternative fonts are banned (which seem to be a new addition to the rules, since that definitely wasn't there last time I checked - so why on earth wasn't "the rules have changed, here's whats different" homepaged?), I honestly don't just see why EMC don't do what every other server that disallows them does and just strips out anything that isn't letters, numbers or regular punctuation
To try and get an idea of the rules around chat/spam I was able to find the following pages were relevant but still don't answer the question, how long is a piece of spam? Err, how long between advertising is allowed? http://empireminecraft.com/wiki/rules/ http://empireminecraft.com/wiki/chat/ http://empireminecraft.com/wiki/chat-language/ http://empireminecraft.com/wiki/reporting-guide/ Are there others around I'm missing? Do we need an advertising guide? Can these spam/chat rules all be put into one place? I do think we need a fairly clear rule regarding time interval because people are free to interpret the current guidelines anyway they wish. On one server I've even been told to shut up and had the locals disagree when I have asked a real spammer to stop (every 3minutes or less, same msg for the 15 minutes I was on the server). In addition, the person using the special characters was using town chat and server hopping. I had to tell him twice to use economy chat and finally got through that what he was doing was probably bad for business. It seems to be the only argument that works. I have seen krysyy mute someone for 5 minutes for advertising in town chat but that is the only time I have seen any mod action on this. I was actually very surprised at it. On SMP6 we have had a bit of tradition of asking people to use e chat but on other SMP's I have never seen anyone complain.
Time is 30 minutes between ads, even in economy chat, but there still should be clarification on these things.
They were banned more than a year ago I believe after it was noted that they result in ????'s in the square logs and therefore are akin to using different languages in public chat channels because moderators cannot do their job and moderate the chat... As for the rest, while some players are hesitant to the structure that rules provide, I will look at clarifying some of these questions in the Rules pages soon.
30 minutes would be great, can you please provide a link to wherever this is stated. As it stands, it is just a rumour at the moment. At other times I have been told 3 and 5 minutes so there is a lot of confusion or interpretation going on.
I know they caused the log problem, just had never noticed that line in the rules before. To be fair, I probably just missed the update.
Can confirm, I told him that. I disagree. Considering we have players from many nationalities, some of which use special characters in their alphabets, completely removing those characters could limit communication in private chats, between friends and such. A lot easier to simply enforce the rule, if needed.
For town chat, only English is allowed, so may as well just block it in town chat at least. Private chats I'd understand leaving it unblocked, but not town.
To quote the rules It says that using languages other than English is spam, due to staff not being able to make sure you are abiding by EMC's rules.
Not a developer, so don't know how possible that is. And before someone comments "zomg it's so easy, it's literally 1 line of code", I'm 99% positive it's a lot harder than that.
I don't really know why you quoted my post, but if you 'read' the rule, it says that the rule is only for public channels and not pm... I too was talking about public channels Thought it was obvious.
Felt like you were pointing out that I mentioned the use of other languages in chat and skipped over the private chat part. Oh well, my bad. Let's get back on track lol
Exactly what i was thinking I do agree that their have been some good points made regarding rule clarity. The rules should agree with eachother, and should say the same thing so it isn't confusing.
