To combat them, here’s a simple filtered-words script that I input website names into manually. It prevents the whole message from popping up in the chat entirely! woo!
I update this script regularly when players report scam websites being said by bots, and reupload the changes to this model. I haven’t had to edit the script for about a month. they just recently made some new website names to spam, so, here are the changes. ^^
you can add new words/websites yourself, but please let me know if you see a website that i should add to the list xxx
EDIT: THE BOTS ARE EVOLVING! Specifically the ones that would post “get-bux.me” have evolved into “get-bux .me” (added a space) which our script actually doesn’t block. (well they do now, but we can’t count on them to NOT continuously evolve) Thanks so much for the recommendations for improving the script, we are taking all comments into account and are going to revise it so maybe, it doesn’t have to be “as manual”, and also, more instant and not to just new servers. I will post the edited version when its done xxxx
I feel like you should remove all messages that have any website in it, instead of having a blacklist. Because in most cases, you don’t put urls in chat.
agreed any links typed in chat for whatever reason isn’t necessary because even if it’s something benign like a youtube link, you would have to manually type in what you see and links tend to be rather long so the best choice would to do it in party chat not in-game
You could use string patterns to filter any valid domain with a full list of TLDs, maybe filter some common replacements like a “DOT” or “D0T” followed by a TLD.
Though, some younger users don’t properly use spacing, so they might write “hello.im avigant.red is my favorite color”, and “avigant.red” would be picked up as possible free robux spam since .red is a TLD.
Some TLDs that are also common words include:
.pizza, .red, .read, .restaurant, .tennis, .weather, and many, many more.
Many of these are perfectly valid to start sentences with so you can’t just remove any website link (even .com could be an easy typo if someone’s starting a sentence with “come” and misplace their space) without some users complaining about how unnecessary it is; the original poster’s approach might work the best if she’s quick to update her system.
Except with how it currently works now, it doesn’t matter if she updates her system. You put the module in the game, there is no automatic updating. It’s not a require, it’s just a chat module with a table of all the values. People would have to constantly replace her system everytime, and if they added any new ones those would be removed.
Never mind then, your solution (while not perfect) would probably be more practical than manually updating the module every time a new scam website pops up.
If anything, keep the blacklist and then manually remove all urls (not the entire messages, just hash out any urls it detects) with common tlds. This would keep most of the message in tact while still censoring out the urls. Then for rarer domain names (which most scammers would try and make it see somewhat official by using a more legitimate TLD) you can blacklist them.
I agree you shouldn’t remove the entire message, though. It tends to be very misleading because the players have no idea why, or what was blocked.
I’m going to create an AI-based predictive algorithm that will return how likely something is a scam (0-1). I will need this for my next project so I may as well open source it when it is done to help others out.
Wonderful script, works perfectly! Thank you this has been a growing problem for a while now. Haven’t gotten any complaints about the scammers on the games I added it to. Also appreciate how easy to modify it is.
