[#SVC-2337] Spambots destroying quality of life, limit free account IMs per day.

2. Second Life Service - SVC

Spambots destroying quality of life, limit free account IMs per day.

Created: 13/May/08 02:19 PM Updated: 17/Sep/09 11:05 AM

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This issue Relates to:

SVC-3631 Create TOS Offense and Punishment for Traffic Fraud

This issue is related to by:

SVC-3877 Meta-Issue: Actions against landbots, bot-farms and misuse of bots.

Last Triaged:

06/Jul/09 09:16 AM

Description

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libsl coders have developed bots capable of spamming individuals, running through the entire user database. they are also able to join open groups to spam multiple messages to hundreds of people.

Now that spam is polluting our IM pathways, we can easily limit it by limiting the number of unique user or group IMs a free account is capable of sending per day to a few hundred. This doesn't mean each comment, but each session. Free accounts generally are not used for IMing across the grid to any degree near that abused by spambots. Putting a throttle in there between the two will raise the cost of spamming significantly and help to curtail the practice.

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Tyrian Camilo added a comment - 26/May/08 09:42 PM

also ban lists for groups would be helpfull aswell, and repercussions for disobeying group rules

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Opensource Obscure added a comment - 08/Jun/09 08:15 AM

No. I don't see statistics or data here, but I think that
1. spambots are a tiny, tiny minority of free accounts. This solution would punish lots of legit users
2. spambots may circumvent the suggested solution by moving to non-free accounts

So, while the problem is likely to exist, I find the suggested solution to be both unacceptable and inefficient.

On a different side, this issue should probably be changed to "New feature request".

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Gordon Wendt added a comment - 08/Jun/09 08:55 AM

I agree with Opensource on all counts. This will have absolutely no effect on spambots and will only hurt legitimate people. I also agree that this should be a feature request not a bug.

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intlibber BnT added a comment - 17/Sep/09 07:10 AM

Spam is not legitimate use of resources. We are seeing people have bots join open join groups, spam a message, and quit the group faster than they can be banned or abuse reported. This happens very frequently. This sort of bot is used usually for promoting a business, but we've also seen it use for defamation/libel.

As a solution, given the spam tends to happen via group chat, is to limit the number of groups that unpaid accounts can join/unjoin per day. This will slow down the bots and thus make them less economical to operate.

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Gordon Wendt added a comment - 17/Sep/09 11:05 AM - edited

Another awful idea. I'll bite my tongue since my preferred response would probably violate a few JIRA rules but my suggestion is please read what you are posting, what you are suggesting is beyond unreasonable and would cripple usage of SL for thousands of legitimate users, you can not set a strict limit that will stop people from joining and leaving groups without hurting legitimate people and there is no way that people would tolerate even a 1 user tolerance for the system being in error there.