In case anyone ever doubted that banning hotmail from the game was the right thing to do:
I just had the displeasure of having to manually clean out two dozen spam accounts from the Might & Fealty forums. All of them, with no exception, were using hotmail accounts.
It's a spam-pit, and if you are using hotmail than I personally think you are a fool who supports a spam operation. Hotmail has been a spam hotbed for at least a decade and they've not bothered to clean up their act. Ever. They just don't care, thus they are supporting spam, thus if you use them, you are supporting spam.
Not doubting you, but I'm surprised I've never heard of this before. Do other sites ban hotmail users too?
Please elaborate why hotmail users support spam?
Pretty much 100% of the people I know has a hotmail account...
Quote from: Buffalkill on October 20, 2013, 06:02:17 PM
Not doubting you, but I'm surprised I've never heard of this before. Do other sites ban hotmail users too?
I've played web games that ban Hotmail and/or yahoo accounts. It seems to me it was much more common several years ago though.
Shizzle: Your Rick Astley link doesn't work anymore.
Quote from: Shizzle on October 20, 2013, 11:02:34 PM
Please elaborate why hotmail users support spam?
I think the thought process goes something like this:
- Tom has seen a great deal of spam come from Hotmail addresses over the years.
- In Tom's mind, spam is one of the biggest, most important problems in the world today.
- Because Hotmail is still one of the hosts of choice for free email addresses for spammers, this necessarily means that Microsoft makes no real effort to stop them (because of #2), and thus this means that they must approve of this activity.
- Furthermore, anyone else who uses Hotmail must also approve of this activity, because if they were right-thinking people, they would obviously boycott such a purveyor of evil.
I think the important point there to keep in mind is #2. As far as Tom is concerned, spamming should be a capital offense. When one is that focused on a particular type of offense, it becomes easy to believe that not only
should everyone else share your view, but that everyone who is not actively working against that offense is a supporter of it who needs to be punished.
Spam is a million-cuts offense. Nobody thinks it's big, because nobody gets killed or robbed. If someone steals $50,000 we all agree he should go to jail. Spam isn't a victim-less crime, it costs something. Time, effort and resources. It's hard to measure exactly, but let's say for arguments sake that a spam e-mail costs 1% of one cent. I know the spam that flooded the M&F forum today cost a lot more than that, because it took about an hour of my time to clean everything out. But let's assume an average.
Your typical spammer sends several million spam mails every day. That's a couple hundred $ in damage - PER DAY. He's doing the $50k heist twice a year. And that's your typical spammer, large operations are tens of times that size.
And Tim, if you think I'm wrong or over-zealous, how about I disable all the anti-spam stuff that this forum runs just for one week and let you clean things up? Just so you know, they have prevented 143,921 spam bot sign-ups since we installed them. That's not world-wide, that is THIS FORUM ONLY. The typical spam bot makes 3-5 postings before he moves on (they know more will trigger deeper spam defenses), so that's about half a million postings prevented by people who agree with me and sat down to write anti-spam software. Which costs time and money.
So yes, everyone who supports spam in even the slightest way is aiding and abetting a criminal.
Why do I count hotmail on that list? Because while other services have their share of spam accounts registered, hotmail stands in a league of its own. They have never, ever, given a !@#$, even before MS bought them. They were listed on rfc-ignorant.org for most of their existence and have consistently ignored messages to both postmaster@hotmail.com and abuse@hotmail.com - two addresses that the "laws of the Internet" REQUIRE you to have for all your domains. Their backend-behaviour is outright hostile, they apparently save costs by pushing the entire burden of e-mail on other servers as far as technically possible with bull!@#$ bounces and delays, aggressive delivery and reluctant reception. They do to e-mail what AOL used to do to Usenet, except that Usenet had at least some organisation and could fight back (and AOL did get awfully close to a UDP).
Quite honestly, I don't think anyone who isn't at the front of this war that we system administrators, server software authors and security professionals fight for you users every day, every year, for over a decade now with no end in sight, should even speak up. There was a proposal a year or two ago that all the server admins of the world should band together and turn of any and all anti-spam tools for just one day. The idea was that if all the law-makers and regular people would actually GET the massive flood of spam that floods the Internet every day, they would finally understand that there really is a problem. The main counter-argument was that doing so would destroy e-mail once and for all.
Don't believe me? Think I'm exaggerting? Numbers: The lemuria.org mailserver has filtered out almost 15,000 spam messages during the past month. That's 500 spam messages every day. Tell me, how long would you bother with e-mail if your inbox would be flooded with a few hundred spam messages EVERY DAY?
If you don't think spam is a massive, out-of-control problem, that's because you live behind the walls that people like me hold for you. It's ignorant to an unbelievable degree. It's like saying that since we're all pretty healthy, all those doctors and hospitals aren't necessary anymore. You are healthy BECAUSE they exist and make it so. And the only reason you think spam is not an Internet-threatening problem is because thousands of people work tirelessly every day writing and maintaining anti-spam software, updating blacklists, cleaning up the mess, figuring out new ways to stop new kinds of spam and keeping the flood at bay.
end rant.
Quote from: Tom on October 21, 2013, 12:06:50 AM
Spam is a million-cuts offense. Nobody thinks it's big, because nobody gets killed or robbed. If someone steals $50,000 we all agree he should go to jail. Spam isn't a victim-less crime, it costs something. Time, effort and resources. It's hard to measure exactly, but let's say for arguments sake that a spam e-mail costs 1% of one cent. I know the spam that flooded the M&F forum today cost a lot more than that, because it took about an hour of my time to clean everything out. But let's assume an average.
Your typical spammer sends several million spam mails every day. That's a couple hundred $ in damage - PER DAY. He's doing the $50k heist twice a year. And that's your typical spammer, large operations are tens of times that size.
And Tim, if you think I'm wrong or over-zealous, how about I disable all the anti-spam stuff that this forum runs just for one week and let you clean things up? Just so you know, they have prevented 143,921 spam bot sign-ups since we installed them. That's not world-wide, that is THIS FORUM ONLY. The typical spam bot makes 3-5 postings before he moves on (they know more will trigger deeper spam defenses), so that's about half a million postings prevented by people who agree with me and sat down to write anti-spam software. Which costs time and money.
So yes, everyone who supports spam in even the slightest way is aiding and abetting a criminal.
[stuff]
Quite honestly, I don't think anyone who isn't at the front of this war that we system administrators, server software authors and security professionals fight for you users every day, every year, for over a decade now with no end in sight, should even speak up.
[stuff]
If you don't think spam is a massive, out-of-control problem, that's because you live behind the walls that people like me hold for you. It's ignorant to an unbelievable degree. It's like saying that since we're all pretty healthy, all those doctors and hospitals aren't necessary anymore. You are healthy BECAUSE they exist and make it so. And the only reason you think spam is not an Internet-threatening problem is because thousands of people work tirelessly every day writing and maintaining anti-spam software, updating blacklists, cleaning up the mess, figuring out new ways to stop new kinds of spam and keeping the flood at bay.
end rant.
Let's equate to spam to bacteria/disease. Spam is bad, I definitely agree with you on that but your suggestion is likes of banning meat because of the many food borne illnesses it can cause , or banning any metal that can rust because of tetanus. While if there was no other way around those issues, that might be a fair thing to do, but with things like cooking meat properly and people getting shots, everyone would agree there is no need to ban meat or metal that can rust. The same logic applies here, banning hotmail, when you can and should install something like reCaptcha to prevent spam bots.
Some other things:
1. I see nothing backing up that spam really costs that much. The hour of time is kinda your fault, since you chose to not use better anti-spam software. (I don't know much about spambots, but even I know that acceptable answers being on the page in regular text, ie not the squiggly stuff, are a bad idea.) If someone didn't gets shots that are common now, it's that person's fault they got sick if it was available to them. Why you don't just use reCaptcha or something similar like most sites, I don't know.
2.Saying anyone not on your side has no right to talk on the subject, is an obvious sign you are way too aggressive on the subject, aka, over zealous.
3. Not supporting doesn't equate to fighting it and not fighting it doesn't equate to supporting it. Your current logic with the spam is anyone not fighting it is , ex. Hotmail not fighting spam more than others, and people not boycotting spam because of it, you see as supporting spam which is simply not true.
4. Disagreement on one thing does not equal disagreement on a separate issue, ie, disagreeing on banning hotmail doesn't equate to disagreeing on using anti-spam software.
Quote from: Penchant on October 21, 2013, 12:57:55 AM
The hour of time is kinda your fault, since you chose to not use better anti-spam software.
I'm done here. We're at the point in the argument where being raped is the girl's fault for wearing a skirt instead of a burka. At that point, there is simply nothing left worth discussing.
Quote from: Penchant on October 21, 2013, 12:57:55 AM
Some other things:
1. I see nothing backing up that spam really costs that much. The hour of time is kinda your fault, since you chose to not use better anti-spam software. (I don't know much about spambots, but even I know that acceptable answers being on the page in regular text, ie not the squiggly stuff, are a bad idea.) If someone didn't gets shots that are common now, it's that person's fault they got sick if it was available to them. Why you don't just use reCaptcha or something similar like most sites, I don't know.
In general this discussion is kinda pointless. But did you ever think about the energy and bandwidth costs associated with spam? The earlier in the chain spam is detected and blocked, the less processing time and bandwidth systems down the line need to expend. Remember much as we are used to email being free, every email does have a cost associated with its creation and its path through the internet.
Also Captcha's aren't perfect. There is a constant "war" between people that code systems to catch scamers, and the programming behind spam bots that aim to circumvent it. So unless we want to set up the forums so that all posts must be approved by a moderator before they are shown, at least some spam is going to filter through.
In general Tom's argument is simple, until pressure is applied to Hotmail to fix their own problems, they are forcing systems down the chain to expend power,energy, processing time and people hours to attempt to reduce the amount of spam they produce. All email systems have problems with spam, the question is about them being proactive with the rest of the internet community in trying to reduce it. While I might no agree with Tom's stance, I do agree that while ever Hotmail is popular, they seem to have little incentive to change their business practise.
Spam is theft. Spammers forge other people to pay the price for processing their garbage.
Quote from: Tom on October 21, 2013, 01:14:05 AM
I'm done here. We're at the point in the argument where being raped is the girl's fault for wearing a skirt instead of a burka. At that point, there is simply nothing left worth discussing.
My apologies for being overly aggressive, it's been a bad day for me so I haven't been in the greatest mood. I certainly don't agree with my prior statement of saying its kinda your fault. While with an illness it might be, it certainly is the spammers fault but I still suggest Captcha.
An an email admin myself, here are my thoughts.
1. Spam does cost money. My company spamhaus.org over $700 per year to use their spammer lists.
2. I don't have a hostmaster or abuse address, because when I did have them, all I received on them was spam. I plan to set up my own Spamikaze server soon, if I do, I may start monitoring abuse and hostmaster and sending the spam to my own blacklist.
3. If I blocked hotmail.com from sending my users email, I would probably be fired. They may have plenty of illegitimate users, but blocking legitimate users is not the way to stay in business.
4. Tom can do what he wants.
When reading Tom's rant and the ongoing conversation, I couldn't help but think of Aragorn explaining to Frodo and the Hobbits what the Numenorian Rangers have to go through to keep the shire safe from wolves, trolls, and the agents of Mordor.
I'm glad the Shire is relatively safe, and that there are developers keeping my inbox clean. I just hope somebody's paying them.
Tom's ban of hotmail is not keeping your mail box cleaner nor is it hurting hotmail. All Tom is doing is hurting BM due to his personal dislike of hotmail getting in the way of making the right decision for the game.
You obviously have no idea how many trolls and !@#$%^&s we had to put up with back before we banned hotmail, and with that about 2/3rd of them.
The other forum is still getting about 10 spam-bot sign-ups EVERY day, ALL of them from hotmail.com - if anyone knows how to teach SMF to blacklist domains, I'll gladly ban it from the forum as well.
It might not hurt them much, but I'm doing the right thing and if more people would do it, then it would hurt. But I can't change other people, I can only do what's right for me and hope others will do what's right as well.
I'm not a webmaster, but I fail to see how Tom is hurting his interests or our community by banning user accounts who are 99% likely to be spambots. Especially considering the choices are 'manually ban spammers in my free time' vs. 'not have the problem and help a cause I support'.
Quote from: anoobowner on October 31, 2013, 02:54:30 AM
I'm not a webmaster, but I fail to see how Tom is hurting his interests or our community by banning user accounts who are 99% likely to be spambots. Especially considering the choices are 'manually ban spammers in my free time' vs. 'not have the problem and help a cause I support'.
Main reason is that we potentially never gain people as players that use hotmail legitimately. Of course this isn't an either or sort of debate. Little point getting these players in if then Tom shuts the entire thing game down due to frustrations dealing with spam
Quote from: De-Legro on October 31, 2013, 03:16:40 AM
Main reason is that we potentially never gain people as players that use hotmail legitimately. Of course this isn't an either or sort of debate. Little point getting these players in if then Tom shuts the entire thing game down due to frustrations dealing with spam
That's not good...maybe in the sign up page there should be a little polite block of text that says 'Please register with an account that does not use the @Hotmail domain. It is our recommendation you do not use Hotmail in general because of numerous spam and security exploits in their system.' That way, the user registering with the account gets the idea that what he is using has problems, and Tom doesn't have to change anything with the anti-spam software BM uses that includes legit Hotmail users? Imperfect solution, but easy!
Quote from: anoobowner on October 31, 2013, 02:54:30 AM
I'm not a webmaster, but I fail to see how Tom is hurting his interests or our community by banning user accounts who are 99% likely to be spambots. Especially considering the choices are 'manually ban spammers in my free time' vs. 'not have the problem and help a cause I support'.
99% is complete BS.
Quote from: Tom on October 31, 2013, 02:33:45 AM
You obviously have no idea how many trolls and !@#$%^&s we had to put up with back before we banned hotmail, and with that about 2/3rd of them.
The other forum is still getting about 10 spam-bot sign-ups EVERY day, ALL of them from hotmail.com - if anyone knows how to teach SMF to blacklist domains, I'll gladly ban it from the forum as well.
It might not hurt them much, but I'm doing the right thing and if more people would do it, then it would hurt. But I can't change other people, I can only do what's right for me and hope others will do what's right as well.
Spambots can be prevented with a decent Captcha. The trolls and !@#$%^&s thing is illogical because unless you literally kicked every user from the game who had a hotmail from the game the first time the ban went into effect, it could simply be a coincidence. As to you hurting hotmail, that's more or less an unintentional lie on your part as you aren't hurting hotmail. When a hotmail user comes to BM and finds out they have to make a new email account in order to play the game, more often than not, they just don't join the game because they don't have any real reason to suggest that BM is so much better than other games if they haven't already played. I probably wouldn't have joined if the ban was in effect when I joined.
I would say probably less than 1% would even consider, let alone actually dropping their email user because it was blocked by a website, so you have likely converted less than a handful of email users so saying it's a crusade against hotmail is a poor excuse. Saying that if you get enough websites to block hotmail you will maybe convert 1% of their users if you are lucky is also a poor excuse because it isn't going to happen due to the sheer number of websites.
I started to investigate this myself and it was harder to find more recent results, the ones I did suggest things different than what you are stating. With things like sweep and other anti-spam things I was getting that it was actually doing quite a lot better than previously. As well, I also found that free mails like hotmail are much less targeted than other "higher quality emails" because of free mails better anti-spam technology. Here (http://blog.returnpath.com/blog/dana-hutens-blog/a-spammers-little-black-book)
Quote from: anoobowner on October 31, 2013, 03:50:51 AM
That's not good...maybe in the sign up page there should be a little polite block of text that says 'Please register with an account that does not use the @Hotmail domain. It is our recommendation you do not use Hotmail in general because of numerous spam and security exploits in their system.' That way, the user registering with the account gets the idea that what he is using has problems, and Tom doesn't have to change anything with the anti-spam software BM uses that includes legit Hotmail users? Imperfect solution, but easy!
AFAIK, no anti-spam software is used although I am far from 100% on that. He simply bans anyone with a hotmail email from joining the game with that email, legit or otherwise.
Quote from: Penchant on October 31, 2013, 03:56:34 AM
Spambots can be prevented with a decent Captcha.
Which is why we catch 99% of the spambots. The remaining 1% still cause manual cleanup work.
Quote
The trolls and !@#$%^&s thing is illogical because unless you literally kicked every user from the game who had a hotmail from the game the first time the ban went into effect, it could simply be a coincidence.
I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. Early in the game we banned people individually. Only after we realized that the vast majority of them were hotmail users did we ban hotmail completely.
Quote
As to you hurting hotmail, that's more or less an unintentional lie on your part as you aren't hurting hotmail. When a hotmail user comes to BM and finds out they have to make a new email account in order to play the game, more often than not, they just don't join the game because they don't have any real reason to suggest that BM is so much better than other games if they haven't already played. I probably wouldn't have joined if the ban was in effect when I joined.
People said the same thing about IE users back when BM started to be intentionally hostile to them. Maybe we lost some players, but that is what a free game can afford and a commercial one can't (without the stakeholders whining about lost profits): Have ethics. Not in some high-level meaning-of-life sense, but in the simple sense of considering things to be right or wrong.
I am not hurting hotmail because it loses users. Even if 5 people switched away from hotmail due in small part to BM (e.g. being so interested they sign up with some other service just to test out BM and then find that other service is better) that's not something hotmail even notices.
But you can say the same thing about the one guy standing up to the injustice in his country. It's got millions of people and his one act won't make a difference. And yet, it does. Because it's about doing the right thing, not about maximizing ROI.
Quote
I also found that free mails like hotmail are much less targeted than other "higher quality emails" because of free mails better anti-spam technology. Here (http://blog.returnpath.com/blog/dana-hutens-blog/a-spammers-little-black-book)
That may be true for their analysis.
Again,
I see the actual spambot registrations. That's not an abstract statistics. Here's the spambots that the anti-spam gate blocked for manual investigation
just in the past 12 hours:
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9638874/spammers.png)
Now stop telling me I'm seeing ghosts.
Quote from: Penchant on October 31, 2013, 03:56:34 AM
I started to investigate this myself and it was harder to find more recent results, the ones I did suggest things different than what you are stating. With things like sweep and other anti-spam things I was getting that it was actually doing quite a lot better than previously. As well, I also found that free mails like hotmail are much less targeted than other "higher quality emails" because of free mails better anti-spam technology. Here (http://blog.returnpath.com/blog/dana-hutens-blog/a-spammers-little-black-book)
From my reading of that article, they are talking mostly email scams. Moving away from Hotmail makes sense here for a few reasons, one being that people in general have learnt to treat emails from companies like Hotmail with a BIT more suspicion. That is different from using hotmail accounts to sign up to wiki's/Forums etc for spam bot activity. Most of the "targets" in this case will likely never see or register the email address, they will just see the spam posts, so it is not worth the effort to secure high quality emails when easily accessible free ones.
Quote from: Tom on October 31, 2013, 03:06:44 PM
Which is why we catch 99% of the spambots. The remaining 1% still cause manual cleanup work.
I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about. Early in the game we banned people individually. Only after we realized that the vast majority of them were hotmail users did we ban hotmail completely.
People said the same thing about IE users back when BM started to be intentionally hostile to them. Maybe we lost some players, but that is what a free game can afford and a commercial one can't (without the stakeholders whining about lost profits): Have ethics. Not in some high-level meaning-of-life sense, but in the simple sense of considering things to be right or wrong.
I am not hurting hotmail because it loses users. Even if 5 people switched away from hotmail due in small part to BM (e.g. being so interested they sign up with some other service just to test out BM and then find that other service is better) that's not something hotmail even notices.
But you can say the same thing about the one guy standing up to the injustice in his country. It's got millions of people and his one act won't make a difference. And yet, it does. Because it's about doing the right thing, not about maximizing ROI.
That may be true for their analysis.
Again, I see the actual spambot registrations. That's not an abstract statistics. Here's the spambots that the anti-spam gate blocked for manual investigation just in the past 12 hours:
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9638874/spammers.png)
Now stop telling me I'm seeing ghosts.
I can't argue against that directly, but provide a solution at the same time. Why not looking into using the spam blocker that the forum uses on Battlemaster? While the email was flagged on a few, the IP address was flagged on all of them, thus you could filter away the spam bots and still get the legitimate users. (Checking still for legitimate users being blocked and even if you don't, at least you are letting in more legitimate users while still preventing spam. As to calling blocking hotmail ethics, I disagree. It is not at all analogous to standing up to injustice IMO, because you are demanding bullet proof glass in all cars and complaining hotmail doesn't have that to protect people, and calling it an injustice.
I hate spam, but I like battlemaster and you are hurting battlemaster significantly because we need all the legitimate users we can get and you don't care. You are not just hurting yourself by blocking hotmail as the man standing up for injustice would by potentially making himself a target, you are hurting everyone who plays the game. I would venture to say that while hotmail wouldn't have "saved" battlemaster, it certainly would have slowed the need to sink islands for instance.
Quote from: Penchant on November 01, 2013, 01:52:51 AM
Why not looking into using the spam blocker that the forum uses on Battlemaster?
I do. The spam blocker is what catches these guys. It blocks most of them (look at the number bottom!) automatically, but when it's not really sure, it throws them up for manual review.
Quote
It is not at all analogous to standing up to injustice IMO,
Not in content. The point with the injustice was that one guy standing up against a police state won't change a thing. He won't hurt the dictator, not even a tiny bit. And STILL it is the right thing to do. And it's not his actions that might change the world, it is the fact that he is acting at all.
Same with Internet !@#$%^&s like AOL or hotmail or others, who disrespect the rest of the net, ignore standards (see far above on that) and generally act like the guy you wouldn't invite again to your parties. As long as everyone accepts their behaviour, nothing will change.
I'm not going to be "everyone". I don't accept !@#$%^&s pissing on my front door, why should I accept !@#$%^&s pissing on my mail server?
So why haven't you blocked IE since they
Quote
disrespect the rest of the net, ignore standards and generally act like the guy you wouldn't invite again to your parties.
especially those old versions.
Quote from: trying on November 01, 2013, 07:11:29 PM
So why haven't you blocked IE
You must be new here. BM is intentionally hostile to IE users and will repeatedly tell them to go and use a real browser.
Yes I've seen those messages but there is a difference between just having an annoying warning and outright blocking them from the site.
Quote from: trying on November 02, 2013, 03:44:37 AM
Yes I've seen those messages but there is a difference between just having an annoying warning and outright blocking them from the site.
Funnily enough the army flags in regions.php doesn't work in Mozilla(a 'real browser') but they work in IE.
We don't intentionally break IE - we just don't support it. It's a PITA to support (so we don't), but it's not sending spam.
If army flags aren't working, then check your adblock settings. The default adblock filters block them. White list the battlemaster domain to fix it.
Ah yeah that fixed it