I've seen people complain about this in other forums around the site, but didn't see an official suggestion yet. It's a minor rule change, but I would like to see posting of auction links be considered spam similar to unnecessary advertising of shops/etc. From what I can tell from reading the rules, this is currently allowed, and if it is not allowed then it is not being enforced. The amount of auction-link chat has been increasing steadily over the past few months. Today during a ~15 minute period I saw at least 7 different people post their auction links in chat, several who connected, posted the link, and immediately disconnected, and none of which used economy chat. I've also seen other players post the link at least once a day every single day that the auction was going on. Today someone even posted a link for a closed auction! Not only is the constant spamming of auction links annoying to other players, but it seems completely unnecessary. People who don't use the forums or at least the auctions are not going to care. People who don't want the item in the auction are not going to care. Anyone who is in the market for the item being auctioned is likely already keeping an eye on the forums, and has no need of the link. Is there any way this can be added as a rule or better enforced?
I +1 this. The occasional link doesn't bother me, but when people just go utopia-9 over and over, it gets very spam-like and annoying.
You can have my +1. I hate seeing these links in chat for the reasons you pointed out in the OP. If people are interested in your auction, they'll see it in the forums - not the link you've 'spammed' into town chat on 10 different servers. EDIT: I also agree with nfell on the shop thingy. I don't want to buy your diamond block you're selling on an smp1 residence while I'm on smp4.
I totally agree, even with economy chat disabled I get these annoyances posted every few minutes and I sometimes resort to turning town chat off...
You get these kind of messages in town chat because the people doing this either don't know about the economy chat, or they know very few people use it
Economy chat was created with things like this in mind. If they aren't using economy chat, they will be muted. Please report those that do this in town chat.