Player Features and Ideas Discussion

First, I checked the Commonly Proposed Ideas thread. I am aware of this thread which seems to address Jita spam, however I did not find a similar suggestion in it - if this idea is truly germane to that topic then please consider this a request to re-open that thread.

Some players will press Shift+Enter repeatedly and send a number of carriage returns to local chat, effectively clearing the chat window. This is often done with the stated aim of "blocking" or "denying" spam. Obviously this only contributes to the volume of data moving through the chat window and can make it difficult to follow a conversation. Regardless of the logic behind the practice, ultimately I feel like it is a question of data sanitization.

As would make sense, if you send a chat message which is entirely whitespace it is discarded. However, one character at the beginning and end of the message allow a player to easily work around this. With a limit of 128 characters that means each message may contain up to 126 line breaks. I am sure there is a wide gamut of chat window heights across the player population, but 126 line breaks at 9 pixels of height each is almost all of a 1920x1200 display and more than the entire height of any lower-resolution display. It seems that players with 2k/4k setups won't have to scroll up, but ~1150 vertical pixels is a lot of screen real estate for a 128 character message in my opinion.

I have not been able to find an official policy or position on whether or not this is by design. I don't see a reason to limit any private channels arbitrarily, but unless the line is intentionally drawn at "up to 128 characters and not entirely whitespace," I feel that it is a reasonable concession to limit players to no more than two line breaks in succession in local (constellation?) chat. Players could still send messages like:



However, forcing every third character to be non-whitespace means that the maximum number of line breaks possible in a message drops to 84, which only takes up 756 pixels vertically. Personally I still feel this is a bit too much power to put in one message, but this at least prevents one player from clearing a relatively large chat window on 1280x800 (and greater) displays.

To prevent this from being obtrusive, players would still be able to enter as many line breaks as desired in the chat textbox itself - any third (and subsequent) line breaks in succession would simply be removed if they were sending the message to a non-private channel.

I welcome thoughts and constructive criticism. Thank you for your time.

I'm not sure if you are asking that seriously or not, but I don't personally support any kind of chat flooding and would be happy to see a strict rate limiter on all local chat. To my knowledge that has not been changed in a long time, and under that assumption I feel like there is a reason that stricter anti-spam measures have not been implemented. However, maybe it's just because no one has brought it up (or listened).

I'm sorry, OP. Did someone scroll your ****** scam out of local before any suckers could read it?

ETA:

I'll even add a suggestion to your thread. Want a conversation you can follow? Start a private one with somebody. Did it ever occur to you that some people might not want to watch your chit-chat scrolling local?

I tip people who clear Jita local with many many linebreaks. It's a service to the community.

I appreciate the alternate perspective, thanks!