Can we get rid of mass paging?

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ID:850000
 
Jul 3 2012, 7:08 pm

Poll: Should mass paging be eliminated?

No 20% (8)
Yes 27% (11)
I'm a troll. Trolololol 52% (21)

Login to vote.

Seriously, the pager isn't even used that often as it is...mass pages are annoying. You know how many DBZ games I've been invited to lately by random keys? It's annoying as hell!
#1 Jul 3 2012, 7:33 pm
Block them.
#2 Jul 3 2012, 9:29 pm
I've already suggested that there be some kind of toggle that you can choose to accept mass pages or not, but no one went for it. The best way to deal with mass pages is to ask them to stop, and if they don't, block them.
#3 Jul 3 2012, 9:49 pm
I'm just glad that there's no pager on the NEStalgia client, which the majority of our player base is now using.

Fielding tons of complaints from our BYOND-newbie players as to why "JoeDBZ" keeps pestering them to join his random anime game was always a pain in the *** to deal with. And it really hurt us when trying to maintain a professional atmosphere- particularly when a lot of them were never too thrilled that they had to install BYOND in the first place.
#4 Jul 4 2012, 8:19 am
They keep on creating new keys. How am I supposed to keep blocking

Joe12345
Joe123456
Joe123456LALALALALA
Joe34343434

and not get annoyed?
#5 Jul 4 2012, 8:22 am
I'm pretty sure BYOND blocks you from making keys at a certain point. At any rate, until a solution is implemented.
#6 Jul 4 2012, 8:23 am
In response to Lugia319 (#5)
Lugia319 wrote:
I'm pretty sure BYOND blocks you from making keys at a certain point. At any rate, until a solution is implemented.

Yeah, but that is so easy to get around it's not even funny.
#7 Jul 4 2012, 8:28 am
The idea isn't to stop it, just to make it more annoying to do. Yeah, I could easily page 4 people at a time to beat the system, but when I'm paging 120 people to join my game, doing it 30 times and making sure not to page the same person twice (for efficiency) gets pretty darn annoying. Is it worth my time to advertise when I know that mass pages are generally frowned upon and do not receive attention? Nope.

In general, I do not approve of mass paging for advertising in the first place. I believe that if a friend wants a friend to join their game, they do it with a 1 person page, in a friendly manner. Because they're friends, not just another player for their anime rip.
#8 Jul 4 2012, 8:29 am
In response to Lugia319 (#7)
Tell that to DBZ Ripper #4516
#9 Jul 4 2012, 8:32 am
The problem is, you're looking for a way to handle mass paging by destroying the purpose it was created for. Mass paging is SUPPOSED to be an advertisement tool. That's the point of the pager. My solution doesn't defeat the purpose, it just gives you a way to opt out of people that just blanket page. The ignore function is still in place to remove the more persistent people, but I honestly believe that if you make mass paging more annoying to the people doing it, that you can shut it down.
#10 Jul 4 2012, 8:42 am
I've been banning people for this. Page me and I'll be glad to do it again if you have a continued issue with someone.
#11 Jul 4 2012, 12:35 pm
I'm confused what mass paging should be used for then? If not to advertise in some way for something going on in your game? Or are you more referring to someone spamming it and not just someone mass paging one time?
#12 Jul 4 2012, 12:40 pm
In response to MaGicBush (#11)
MaGicBush wrote:
I'm confused what mass paging should be used for then? If not to advertise in some way for something going on in your game? Or are you more referring to someone spamming it and not just someone mass paging one time?

Spamming with multiple keys.
#13 Jul 4 2012, 1:52 pm
Personally, I don't view unsolicited mass paging as a valid form of advertising. I think we should ditch it in favor of having people subscribe to the hub entry if they want news (maybe with the option to send a page from the hub entry itself to its subscribers; as the forums will 'ping' when anyone posts, not just the game's staff). It would be one more member perk, at least. There's also still the waiting list if people actually want to know when a game is up.

It also sounds like it's primarily used to spam rejected games (ie DBZ).

But that's just my personal opinion, and I don't use the pager anymore, so it's a non-problem for me.
#14 Jul 4 2012, 3:12 pm
Mass pages should be removed because the pager should be removed. A site-based pager (aka: private messages) is less invasive, more intuitive, and is something that people can only use knowingly (people have to use the pager to run games, they're not knowingly connecting to an IM-like program, people using the web-based pager are aware that it's for sending private messages to forum users).

The pager is a thoroughly confusing piece of software that contains a communication component for seemingly no reason. I'd bet that most people think pager messages are like those advertisements that look like fake IM conversations.

Mass paging is something that BYOND provided and idiots latched onto it. The BYOND staff knows there'd be an uproar if they got rid of it and they'd lose membership money, but there's no legitimate reason for BYOND to need the pager's communication capability. It only perpetuates the idea that advertising your game should be done strictly within the BYOND community, even though that's an idea the BYOND staff is also trying to do away with.
#15 Jul 4 2012, 3:22 pm
The hub has some blocks on excessive paging (I think around 20 users). It also looks for impersonation attempts (to avoid the bogus "staff" pages). And we ban users caught abusing the system.

But this is another example of users over-inflating a problem. Fact is that you have to be a Member to page, and there aren't really that many Members. So all people have to do is block the spammers and they won't be bothered. There is no reason to invalidate the whole paging system (which is useful for syncing with friends) on account of this. I admit it is fairly outdated and it is something we will look at depending on how the Flash setup changes our site (that is, whether it would make more sense in a web concept). But it is hardly the problem the usual culprits make it out to be. And if it truly is, just run the pager in private mode and you won't have the issue.
#16 Jul 4 2012, 3:28 pm
In response to Tom (#15)
Tom wrote:
The hub has some blocks on excessive paging (I think around 20 users). It also looks for impersonation attempts (to avoid the bogus "staff" pages). And we ban users caught abusing the system.

But this is another example of users over-inflating a problem. Fact is that you have to be a Member to page, and there aren't really that many Members. So all people have to do is block the spammers and they won't be bothered. There is no reason to invalidate the whole paging system (which is useful for syncing with friends) on account of this. I admit it is fairly outdated and it is something we will look at depending on how the Flash setup changes our site (that is, whether it would make more sense in a web concept). But it is hardly the problem the usual culprits make it out to be. And if it truly is, just run the pager in private mode and you won't have the issue.

New users don't know any of that. They only know they're getting seemingly bogus advertisements from something they didn't even know was a chat program. Like most problems, this is only a problem because the staff can't see it. People who have to download BYOND to play a game will expect it to be something like Flash, Shockwave, Unity, DirectX, JRE, or the .NET framework - some underlying program needed to run an application. If installing Flash connected you to an IM server and you started receiving messages from strangers, you'd uninstall Flash in a heartbeat!
#17 Jul 4 2012, 3:31 pm
I used to get random messages on AIM all the time so I just put it in private mode and the problem is gone. This is overblown because the #spammers isn't that high (because they have to be Members and we block them). I bet you've never actually gotten spam but are complaining about it anyway.
#18 Jul 4 2012, 3:32 pm
In response to Forum_account (#16)
Forum_account wrote:
Tom wrote:
The hub has some blocks on excessive paging (I think around 20 users). It also looks for impersonation attempts (to avoid the bogus "staff" pages). And we ban users caught abusing the system.

But this is another example of users over-inflating a problem. Fact is that you have to be a Member to page, and there aren't really that many Members. So all people have to do is block the spammers and they won't be bothered. There is no reason to invalidate the whole paging system (which is useful for syncing with friends) on account of this. I admit it is fairly outdated and it is something we will look at depending on how the Flash setup changes our site (that is, whether it would make more sense in a web concept). But it is hardly the problem the usual culprits make it out to be. And if it truly is, just run the pager in private mode and you won't have the issue.

New users don't know any of that. They only know they're getting seemingly bogus advertisements from something they didn't even know was a chat program. Like most problems, this is only a problem because the staff can't see it. People who have to download BYOND to play a game will expect it to be something like Flash, Shockwave, Unity, DirectX, JRE, or the .NET framework - some underlying program needed to run an application. If installing Flash connected you to an IM server and you started receiving messages from strangers, you'd uninstall Flash in a heartbeat!

It's pretty damn obvious. It's called a pager, and there's a friends tab. Programs like Steam have the same thing. You can't expect the staff to sit there holding the hand of every new user and spoon feed them all of the information they could possibly need.
#19 Jul 4 2012, 3:40 pm
In response to ExPixel (#18)
ExPixel wrote:
It's pretty damn obvious. It's called a pager...

That's exactly the problem! You know it's "the pager" but no new user knows that. They just know it's something they had to download to play a game they saw.
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