SpamThrottle for World of Warcraft
SpamThrottle for World of Warcraft | I’ll occasionally be mentioning some rather great addons. For the first of this series, I’m going to be telling you about SpamThrottle. First, let me bring this all into context.
A lot of the multiboxers here play on the Blackrock-US server. Its one of the oldest, most-crowded, most-competitive servers that Blizzard has. There are raid PUGs forming for everything from old world content, to the weekly raid quests, to heroic farming, to even Trial of the Grand Crusader and the new Icecrown instances. Until 3.3, the best place to find and build a PuG was the Trade channel.
Now, we all know that in 3.3 Blizzard made the LFG channel city wide and open to everyone in the city. So, whenever you’re in the Trade channel, you’re also in the LFG channel. But “traditions” (ie easy to change habits) are apparently hard to change and Trade still get hit by 95% of LFG traffic. You can probably imagine that this would be quite a bit of spam when you mix in the usual chat in the trade channel. Which is exacerbated by people feeling that the only way their message will be seen in the spam is by spamming their own message over and over. Get 4-5 people doing this and the effect snowballs into a stream of chat that no one can possibly read.
This is where SpamThrottle comes in. What is does is displays the first time a message is sent and then blocks repeated messages with the same content (say from a macro spam) from being displayed. It does a really good job of it too.
By default, SpamThrottle will use its color filter option. This option simply makes the spam its effecting turn a darker shade of gray, which doesn’t solve the problem, but you can see from all the gray what it can do. Simply type “/st hide” and all those gray messages disappear. Trade is now a crawl of its former speed. So, grab yours now and return your trade chat to normal speeds.
Grab up SpamThrottle from Curse - http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/spamthrottle.aspx
Tagged with: addon, channel, chat, curse, lfg, mod, pug, spam, spamthrottle, throttle, trade, World of Warcraft, wow Category: Game News, World of Warcraft
Question, what happens if you my chat mods use the color gray for some reason, using the “/st hide” will hide good text? or it will hide the repetitive (spam) ones only?
Oh god this should be built into the Blackrock server.
Im also on blackrock and grabbed this addon about a week ago and its amazing!! One thing I did notice is that in very high spam rate chat channels the /st hide command is needed otherwise the text moves just as fast as it normally would which makes reading still extremely difficult.
On capos question I do the same thing and Spam throttle only hides the text that it grays out. All it does it take the same filters and change what the result output would be from change color gray to hide.
So does the addon just look for the same person talking twice in a row and just mute it?
Hi All – Just answering some questions:
The addon works by keeping track of unique message text. So if someone says “SPAM” in trade chat once, it will appear. If the person (or anyone else) says “SPAM” the message will be tagged as a repeat, and marked for filtering. The addon does not care who said it, or what chat channel it was said in.
On the addon coloring question, if you have another addon that turns text gray (even the same shade), it does not matter. The only problem you might have is that you wouldn’t be able to tell whether the text was turned gray by SpamThrottle or by the other addon. SpamThrottle is designed to be very lightweight, and compatible with other addons.
Note that I’ve changed the addon with the latest release to default to “/st hide” mode, rather than color mode. If you’ve run a previous version it won’t change your existing preferences (which may have been /st color), but it should give a better out-of-box experience to new users.
In version 1.3, I’ve also added a “Gapping Value.” This is like an expiry time, which is set by default to 600 seconds. It means that a message will appear again if sent again more than 10 minutes later. Each unique message has it’s own timer, starting from the last time it was displayed and not filtered. Sometime you actually DO want to be reminded that a group is forming for something and they haven’t filled yet.
Version 1.3 of SpamThrottle is available now from http://www.curse.com. And thanks, by the way Lindline, for the very nice writeup!
– Orukxu, Author of SpamThrottle