I think it should really depend on how jarring it is. If it bothers you and likely others a lot, it's spam. If it doesn't, it's not. A threshold would certainly be higher than 6 in some cases, but not all.

 

I agree, you are doing the work of heroes.

 

Spam should be 10+ unnecessary characters. You should be punished for falling asleep on the keyboard- you played too long lol

 

^ I agree with what he said

 

I am guessing this suggestion sprouted from you being warned in game :p

Anyways, I agree with what you have to say. A few dots don't really bother me or affect my gameplay. Neither do a lot of things that are deemed as spam by staff.

 

+1

 

I basically agree. There is spam meant to be disruptive and that should be warned against, there is spam that is just expressive and would fly anywhere else on the internet like "........" or heeeeeey or "nooooooo I died" and there's even spam that's unnecessary but not worth getting fussed about because the user is unlikely to do it again and it's not worth getting riled up for. I think it would be a major +1 if it weren't for the fact that at the end of the day we can't have nice things because there are those who will abuse the crap out of this.

Personally rather than a rule change allowing some dogmatic number of symbols or repeated letters, I'd rather just see a policy change to "at the moderators' discretion". I mean I'm pretty fond of the team and I can't think of a member on it who I think would not be able to use contextual cues to determine what's harmful or not.

Another important thing to remember is that if you've been told "hey that's a little spammy" that's not exactly getting in trouble or anything, that's a gentle reminder. It's seriously a "hey let's not go too crazy because I don't want you to legit get in trouble". I've only seen people actually kicked for spam or banned for it when it either 1. lasted all day mingle with a whole variety of different flavors of trolling or 2. literally looked like the player was typing with headbutts just to troll.

 

Completely agree, we need to set a limit and restriction on specific amounts of characters rather than just saying 'staff discretion' . This is one issue we have and it is one of the issues that explains inconstancy and inconsistent warnings.

 

That being said, I think by assigning specific rules people will actively evade them to be 'annoying' whilst still being within the rules. For example if one of the rules that comes from this is that you can't have 5 consecutive letters then people will type llllIllllIllllI whilst saying 'There's only 4 L's in a row!'.

I agree that staff need to remember not just to blindly enforce the rules; I think staff being reminded of the /reason/ why it's there, as opposed to making 'stricter' spam rules is the direction we should go in.

 

Spam does need some defined terms... some staff get more annoyed by certain spam levels and all that but... staff discretion needs to be used alongside some more firm definitions.

 

Once you start being concise and settings limits on things, users find a way around it. Its best to be vague with rules. I agree with Harryhaz1's example.

 

Creating more specific rules creates more routes around them. Different mods have different tolerance levels but regardless of the mod no one is getting anything worse than a "hey please don't spam" unless they get belligerent about it. And if you're belligerent about it, you should know what's gonna happen.

 

@Moderator - please keep the above in mind when warning for spam.

(Not going to make hard limits, too easy to get around them. While I realize this will lead to some discrepancies, spam is a lot like ______, you can't easily define it, but you know it when you see it).