Handling Multis

[wrestler]

After a couple of weeks of live action it is clear that many people have a dozen or more Mxit accounts. In multi-player games this is often a major advantage and this is also a good way of cheaters and trolls overcoming bans.

The multi-cheaters we can probably handle internally by restricting and penalising some user interactions and monitoring them.

However the multi-trolls are an altogether more unpleasant bunch who ensure that we have to watch the shoutbox constantly - the profanity filter now has 2 levels of regular expressions and over 55 combination of terms being watched - it needs constant upgrading at the moment as they come back with new approaches. Also everyone needs to watch those op codes and alerts - very nasty - Mxit should warn all developers on that one.

Although they will probably just create a new Mxit account is there any way we can report very unpleasant accounts to Mxit to get them chucked off Mxit entirely?

[thetourist]

Yep, this is the part of developing apps on mxit that could easily make you discouraged. May I present this bit of humour to help you a bit (bit of naughty language ahead): http://bit.ly/NNXHYW

Basically as it states, give people an audience and a persona to hide behind and normal rational people turn into the worst kind of trolls possible. Although not a great solution, but one that is at least realistic is to allow people to block other people.

[wrestler]

Yes, that pic is so true

I've taken our shoutbox offline after the 3rd coordinated attack by racists in 4 days - There followed a torrent of very nasty abuse directed at admin - I know I should not take things personally but it is not nice to deal with that type of thing while you are taking your young kids out on a Sunday.

Aside from the abuse and the complaints I did get a couple of pleasant messages of support of feedback including - "Finally a Mxit game that takes a stand against profanity and racism" - does this mean that no one else seems to care about this?

If our shoutbox does return it will probably be one of most restricted and penal chat rooms in history - sure that will be a selling point!

[wrestler]

Well , the shoutbox did return and it has been working reasonable well with over 50000 messages now through it - we have a first pass for special characters, a second pass for other characters combos and op codes and finally the profanity/racism filter which covers about 75 terms now. If something gets caught by the profanity filter then it does not show and the user gets a shoubox ban (1st ban 1 min, 2nd 1 hour, 3rd 2hours, 4th 4 hours and nth (n-1 pow 2)) I have also added a slap function so that if I cruise by and see people bypassing the filters I just give them 20 min bans. I tried giving some of the players the slap function but that just caused problems. If people try to get around the filter we add those terms and then catch them - if the user really needs to go away we slap them with a 10 year ban. The major complaint is around unfair bans especially by people posting in Afrikaans and even though we tried to deal with that the affected users have held a grudge for a long time.

[StEaLtHmAn]

I have a multi-account tracking system.

It checks for similarities in users that interact with each other and records the data.
it checks DoB, Login Location, Register location, gender and device. very usefull for deciding if the users are the same person but unfortunately its not full proof.