Hint, Special Task Force: R M T i,s dog (dog=not) t|h|a|t sTUpid

I apologize in advance for the people who cannot read that title, but I do that to make a point.

Yesterday was my first good 7-hour FF11 session in quite some time. And it is clear that, using many of the methods I illustrate above, that the filters against RMT spam worked for about one month, but no longer.

I literally made about a GM call an hour for that entire run, and only one of those seven calls was not RMT/filter-evasion material.

These people are not stupid, Square-Enix -- they've figured out how to get one step ahead of your system.

1) Substitution strings: We know that many of the site names are in the filter, as is the word "bonus", which is often used in an RMT advertisement. So, often what they will do is what I did in the title above with the word "dog", except they will not use it for an entire word (because that word is in the filter), but for a portion of the word or the website name.

Another way I see this going down is something like this:

"Blog by Sierra Tango Alfa Romeo Charlie Alfa Delta Echo"

What did I just do? I spelled "STARCADE" in the NATO phonetic alphabet.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet)

Anyway, what would stop RMT from doing the same thing?

2) Punctuation insertions. Like the word "is" (i,s) and "that" (t|h|a|t). I've seen this on repeated occasions. It's not unlike many sites I go to, where obscene and unpleasant words are automatically censored, even if those words are part of other words ("grape", for example, for the latter case).

So they get around censoring website names by adding punctuation...

3) Spacing.

... and spacing. I saw an actual .cn Chinese RMT website get through the filters with both spacing and punctuation.

So why do I post this?

Here's a hint: YOU WILL NEVER DEFEAT RMT WITHOUT SICCING LEGAL ON THEM AND SHUTTING THEM DOWN.

Your filters effectively worked for about a month, Square-Enix!

But they work no longer, for you think that the RMT (especially the organized Chinese RMT rings) are as stupid as you think most of us are.

So, I reiterate: Get Legal to shut down these websites for the theft and sale of Square-Enix proprietary property (as much as you would with a website doing the same with PHYSICAL S-E proprietary property (which see the lawsuits you won against some of the vendors from a few months ago.

Else, you will once again lose to RMT.

Edit: This post has been sent to the Special Task Force through the relevant Square-Enix website.