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On Fishing, Bots, and the Board |
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If you're reading this, I assume that you are one of the few people who might check my journal on their own or the more likely scenario that I linked you. Or, possibly, you get this linked by another fisher as I will be requesting people do when I link it to them due to the nature of the content in this entry.
At the time of this entry I am an Omni Moderator, but I am NOT speaking for Gaia as a company. I'm writing this entry because there are a lot of misconceptions regarding how to deal with certain things and how the process goes. I'll be attempting to clear up some of these issues, but keep in mind that I can't disclose everything that I would like to, as I have signed an NDA.
Fishing has had issues with bots for years. Even the first or second month it was released I remember talk of a bot on the boards that was removed relatively quick. Overall things were pretty bot free through 2005. However, come about 2006, Fishing was still one of the best ways to make gold, so people started botting it a lot more. Since then we've had issues with bots. Some months it was so bad that not a single legit fisher would show up on the Durem board. Instead it would be covered with gibberish names making impossibly high scores. In 2007 or 2008, CAPTCHA was added to the game in an attempt to stop or slow bots. There are those that seem to think bots stopped existing at that point, but they didn't. While the CAPTCHA keeps them from doing buckets in a completely automated fashion, bots can still do everything hands-free except put in the passcode to save their bucket. Basically, Fishing pretty much always has and pretty much always will have problems with bots. Unless/until Gaia sets a flash dev or three to make Fishing more secure, things will stay as they are, and I don't foresee that happening soon.
What to do with bots
So, one of the biggest things fishers worry about in regards to bots is how to make sure they get banned. This summer especially has brought me more complaints, accusations and misplaced PM "reports" of botting than I would like to recount. I totally get the concern; I have earned 21 trophies (The whole set except Gambino Gold) on this account and a Bronze on a mule. Most of these were done before 2008. Since there seems to be some confusion, allow me to try to explain what one should do.
The first and most preferred option in dealing with bots is to report them. A report puts the accusation on record (a mere accusation is not enough for a ban though), time stamp, and a bit of the room logs. If the potential bot has said something incriminating, like linking to the bot itself, that will be there. If the bot leaves before you get a chance to report them, don't fret. Report someone else in the room instead, and fill out the Additional Notes saying who you meant to report, why you thought he or she was botting, etc. This gives us the logs still, so anything the bot said (assuming you don't wait a long time to report and a lot of chatter has happened) will still be in the report. These reports will eventually come to me or someone that I have directly trained how to properly deal with fish bots, even if we aren't the one to see your report first.
Sometimes though, you can't report the user for whatever reason. Maybe you have one of those add-ons that show the change in score since the last time you checked and the suspected bot is doing 666 point buckets in Durem, or 522 points in Gambino consistently, etc. Or maybe they got onto the board yesterday and suddenly jumped up 4 days worth of constant fishing since then. Maybe they are a 3 day old account selling 100 hellfish one day, then 90 more the next day, along with Boldurs or something. Whatever the reason at that point, you obviously still need to report them, but can't report them via the proper form. This is when you need to visit the Fishing Forum Moderator List and PM one of us. I do not recommend PMing siskataya however, as she is very busy because she is part of Gaia's paid staff and thus has a lot to do each day. Any of the green names should suffice, as even if I'm not the one receiving the PM, the case will still be looked at by one of the Omni Moderators on that list. While I can't speak for the other mods, I will be looking over any PMs I get about bots, even if I don't reply.
The Fishing Scoreboard
Most of the time bots are found on the Fishing Stats Page. The reality of the matter is that most people care less about the fish bots put into the system (it brings prices down a bit, which is actually bad for "career fishers" ) and more about the fact that they are taking up spots on the board in trophy positions. I get it, as I noted above I've won 22 total trophies as of this entry posting.
I've been told many times that "You should have someone dedicated to taking care of the bots every month". Frankly, I find this a bit amusing. There is no official "board cleaner" position or something that Gaia HQ delegates. However, I am the one who does "board cleaning". I go through the whole board on the last day of the month and make sure that the bots are banned and removed before scores reset so that people can see their proper places in the final hours of the competition if they were unsure.
I don't typically just do it once a month though, and I'll go into that below.
What it takes to "Clear the board"
Okay, so you might have read the bit above and went "so he cleans the board all of one time a month? That sucks, what about the rest of the time?"
The simple answer to those questions are No, and yes, that sucks, let me elaborate.
I do not have a set number of times that I clean the board each month. It is almost guaranteed that it will be more than once, but how many more times I don't know. This is because a lot of work goes into looking over things.
There are two phases to my work in dealing with the board. The first phase is literally combing over the boards and finding bots directly on it "right now". The second phase is unfortunately stuff that I cannot talk about in any kind of detail. I will say however that the first phase alone can take me half an hour or more, up to an hour and a half depending on how many bots are actually on the board. Remember, I have to look though stuff for each account. The second phase varies in time, but typically takes anywhere from one to five hours. When you factor both phases in, a single session of cleaning the board can take anywhere from an hour and a half to six and a half hours. And I'm fast, really fast, at this work.
As you can see, clearing the board is very time consuming work. Unfortunately, I have a lot of other mod work to do. Omni moderators have to deal with Hacks, Scams, and other kinds of reports and situations that users never even see or think about. While I can't go into detail about this, let's just say that there is always plenty for me to do as a mod. And that's just Gaia stuff, there is still real life to attend to as well. I know that it's not a perfect system, but it's what we got to work with. Just know that we DO have people looking out for bots, and that the board really is checked up on, even if it's not every single day.
What not to do
To go along with the section above about what you should do if you find a bot, there are some things you should not do as well.
The first is not to PM a mod about someone in a game room instead of or in addition to reporting them unless there is information to add. I sometimes get PMs about someone "reporting" a user that they have already reported in-game for being a bot, or advertising bots, whatever. I understand that the situation is important, but so is everything else in the queue. PMing a mod when there is already a report on the matter is just kind of redundant, and PMing a mod INSTEAD of reporting means that they likely cannot act on the evidence supplied typically. While I can look to see if an account is botting regardless of whether or not there is a normal report, if the offense was something that the user said (advertising a bot, for example), then I would need one in order to take action for that particular offense. Reporting is always preferred to PMing a moderator in cases like these (For extreme things like gore or porn trolls, PMing an online mod is fine, but this is an entry about bots).
The other thing that I'd like to note is not to reference the Portal as the reason that you are reporting, or the evidence for which you are reporting. This is not because it is supposed to be a hush-hush secret organization or something. I've actually spoken about it to an admin just so they know it's there and what it does. The main reason is because frankly, most mods will have no idea what you are talking about. While most of the mods who deal with fishing stuff (there are others that deal with the game reports that aren't on the forum list) may know that the Portal is, some do not, and the rest of the mod team certainly does not know about it. Citing the Portal as your evidence or why you think they are a bot and leaving it at that says nothing to someone who isn't familiar. It's also an off site tool, which means that it cannot and will not be used in determining action against accounts. If you have no idea what I'm talking about when I reference the Portal, then don't even worry about it, as you can't possibly be doing this particular thing.
Closing notes
I know this is a very, very long entry, and I apologize. But this stuff needs to be put out there, since most people seem unaware of how things work. Fishing may have some of the most devoted people on the moderator team looking out for it, but we still have to adhere to the general moderation policies just like everyone one else. I know we may seem aloof and out of touch, and in some cases we are. But I was, and consider myself to still be one of you guys, even if I don't post as much as I used to. If we're not posting as often as we used to, it's because we're looking out for Fishing and the rest of the site.
If there's something that I didn't cover here, please feel free to ask in the comments. Just remember that I am limited in what I can say about moderator related stuff.
~Gaidin
 Gaidin · Fri Sep 09, 2011 @ 12:08am · 2 Comments |
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