"SPAM IS MY MIDDLE NAME"

A frequently heard grumble, particularly from players on RP servers, concerns misuse of the player-moderated chat channel Global Looking for Fellowship (GLFF), with "player-moderated", in this case, being a euphemism for "unmoderated". GLFF, on those servers which have implemented it, is supposed to be for people looking for fellowships across all regions of Middle-earth. Being a channel most players keep permanently open, unless they are actually on a quest or raid, in practice it tends to be used for lots of other purposes, including idle chit-chat - irritating, if you are only keeping half an eye on GLFF in the hope of finally catching mention of that quest you've been trying to complete for the last two weeks.

However, what really gets some people wound up is the hijacking of the channel by LOTRO's equivalent of drunken louts, who use it to exchange incomprehensible badinage at tedious length; judging by the palpable snigger which accompanies many of these exchanges, the perpetrators are mostly 12-year old male refugees from WoW. Inevitably, increasingly annoyed requests for said louts to take themselves off to another channel and desist from clogging up GLFF are met by even more frenzied spamming.

I guess that's why the Lords of Creation (a.k.a. LOTRO devs) gave us ignore lists, though they might usefully have increased their maximum capacity. The following brief excerpt from a Chat Log which I saved a couple of months ago and just recently rediscovered gives a pretty good idea of what comes through an average evening. Names have not been changed to protect the guilty.

### Chat Log: General 04/25 08:30 PM ###

[GLOBALlff] Runarfin: 'rofl'
[GLOBALlff] Malethor: 'whats consonants preciouse?!:o whats consonants?:o'
[GLOBALlff] Arandarion: 'well, just don't react when someone starts to spam, or it becomes a massive spam in here :o'
[GLOBALlff] Runarfin: 'con-so-nants!'
[GLOBALlff] Erlo: 'Etten raid up.'
[GLOBALlff] Runarfin: 'b-b-boil em mash-em stick em in a stew'
[GLOBALlff] Thrawneekaran: 'watcher raid looking for burg now, any good out there?'
[GLOBALlff] Malethor: 'xDD'
[GLOBALlff] Erlo: 'God can people stop random spam. I do spam abit but this is just pure silly.'
[GLOBALlff] Candytuft: 'I'm excellent, but unavailable :-p'
[GLOBALlff] Dworim: 'ahahaha Runarfin'
[GLOBALlff] Glewdron: 'we always try to repel em but they always return in greater numbers -.-'
[GLOBALlff] Runarfin: 'spam is my middle name'
[GLOBALlff] Mpty: 'So I see.'
[GLOBALlff] Glewdron: '(speaking about spam)..'
[GLOBALlff] Runarfin: 'you just split my first name'
[GLOBALlff] Mpty: 'Whats the fun of spam if noone listens.'