A dumb ""fix"" to advertisements

[Ria]

Since Minehut's update of November 2nd the amount of advertisements in lobbies have been greatly reduced from what I've seen, though not everyone is using the new feature /ad to advertise, they still do it through the chat. I don't want to do anything controversial nor force something people maybe don't like, this is just a suggestion. This is mainly directed to the developers, but I wouldn't mind any responses or comments regarding to this.

• Simple and lazy: Block the message
  If I am correct, people can still say "please do /join xyzabc" without any punishment so far (supposing there are no moderators online in the lobby). I am not a genious programmer, but what I could simply do is to check if the message contains "/join" (unless it's at the very front of the message, thus being just a regular command) or "*.minehut.gg". If that's the case, then the message either could be blocked, sudo run /ad with the message, prompting them to use /ad or sending a little neat message that they can reach out more people by checking out the forums. Sure as it was stated, "After a few weeks/month grace period, we’ll stop warning and instantly mute users who do not advertise servers in the /advertise command." might be in effect soon, but in my opinion _{(please don't kill me)} this is a little harsh, but also pretty effective if there are multiple violations.
• "it was a typo oops"
  Like above, I belive that people can just say "7JOIN XYZABC" and pretend that they made a typo (with caps lock in that case). Instead of the example above, I would instead just "fix" the typo and make the player sudo repeat the message, but with a forward slash instead of 7, 6 or even "T"/"Y" (or Z if you have a qwertz keyboard ...like me), simply replacing the typo.
• Reward them for using /ad- wait wh??
  This sounds more ridiculous as it might increase the amount of advertisings, but that would pretty much keep them up doing /ad instead of bypassing it without getting anything in return. I don't really have any good ideas what kind of rewards a player could get, so if you decide to introduce this, well you're on your own with the ideas.
• Verify the server to allow advertising it
  Hoo, listen, I've seen people advertise servers from which they don't own, so effectively promoting other servers to bypass /ad. I have no idea how to stop this other than to check if the server that's being advertised is owned by the player, or just straight up punishing them but oh well which mod is going to join a server to see who it's getting owned by?
  ...And for last,
• Daily limit
  This sounds even more ridiculous but oh boy do you love to see someone buying Patreon rank and then bot it to send out 1440 times an advertisement a day? Not that it's anywhere close to happen but imagine. Might be an useless change but well, if anything, then we can stop the bots from advertising a server.

Edit: pretend that I posted this in suggestions kthx

Edited November 10, 2020 by Ria

[Houlton]

Hi there,

There has been talks about blocking /join (and anything related) but were quickly dropped due to the fact that someone could be helping someone in chat and telling them to do "/join <servername>" would be blocked.

The other ideas are... questionable.

[Reassembly]

Hey, As @Houlton said above, some of these ideas may not work, but it isn't a bad idea to open an issue on the Minehut Meta https://github.com/Minehut/Meta

[MikeTheAngel]

The last suggestion just puts another nail in the coffin for ranks then. I think if someone wants to spend $600 approx to advertise 1440 times a day, we should allow it.

Edited November 11, 2020 by MikeTheAngel

[UntitledGoose]

Simple and lazy - Houlton posed issue above, would block people's messages when they try to help others

it was a typo oops - If the user keeps up with their 'typo's, then it's pretty straight forward that they're just trying to get around /ad.

Reward - We really don't have anything to reward them. Credits? People can already get credits with /vote, and letting them get free credits every 8 minutes (at max) would allow players to net massive amounts of credits in a week, which encourages people not to buy credits but rather abuse this system.

Verify the server - This is an intriguing solution, though it'd require lots of effort for staff to check out servers and review 'applications'(?) and determine if servers should be verified or not. I'd recommend we rather require the player to have linked their Minecraft account with their Minehut account.

Daily limit - I'd imagine this would be a useless change, yeah. Nobody's gonna spend $600 and then bot just to get muted, and I'd imagine hardly anybody would hit the limit either way.

 

EDIT: I was trying to make it seem like I'm not searching for reasons not to implement ideas, but I failed at that pretty hard.

Edited November 11, 2020 by TheGoose

[Ria]

Oh thanks for the responses, I didn't expect that to get any kind of attention at all for this haha
Now sure thinking about it, I should've probably rethought about the first idea (which could be blocking others trying to help) and the last one (as barely anyone would hit the limit) as both barely make any sense. Other than that though, I just want to quickly clearify the verification thing as I haven't made too much thoughts about it, the verification process shouldn't be as complex as it sounds like, it's just making sure "yep the server that is advertised is owned by this person" and nothing else (so it could be pretty much be automated in some form), otherwise if it'd be a more complex process it wouldn't make much sense to just enable /ad for that person with the server in question. Also thanks for letting me know that there is a Meta discord, totally forgot about checking it out.