Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

[MisterCookie]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

This is nothing new to the PRC, their government already blocks off dozens of pro-Western sites. Do a search on the Chinese version of Google for Tiananmen Square and you'll see what I mean.

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

Area being banned:

• People's Republic of China
• ...

Areas of the above that are EXCLUDED from the ban:

• ...
• Republic of China (Taiwan / Formosa)

Meh. Taiwan is not part of PRC.

Existing members posting in any of the listed areas, excluded or not, must PM me as soon as possible to avoid getting caught in the ban!

Has there actually been noticeable number of problem posts from Taiwan and other "excluded" area? >_>;

[Wise Donkey]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

There's some old adage about this. The exact verbage escapes me right now, but it involves a swimming duck ...

The one that comes to my mind is "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, chances are it's a duck." It appears RMT are a serious problem on the Forum, so chances are that they really are. Good job locking it down.

[forster]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

I personally see this as a step in the wrong direction, but it wont stop me posting here.

The forum admins have to protect their users.

[Kholdstare]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

I'm not going to lie. This is a case of us (legit players) vs. them (RMTs) and as RMTs ARE quite common in these particular areas, I am all for this regional access prohibition.

In all honesty, I never understood why SE never implemented this for the actual game, as China was never even meant to be part of the community.

[Feba]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

RMTs ARE quite commonly in these particular areas,

Fixed.

[Omni]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

[/LIST]Meh. Taiwan is not part of PRC.
Has there actually been noticeable number of problem posts from Taiwan and other "excluded" area? >_>;

They need to take Republic of China out of the official name for Taiwan.

but thats a whole other topic that I shouldnt get started on.

[Dwarkyzidez]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

Ok, I don't have a very big name on these forums, but I'm going to have to stand up. You are banning people from China or Korea from coming to this site just because of RMT issues? Then you say you cannot post proof that they are from China/Korea? I do not argue that most aren't from there, but you need to have proof. Post it. It's comparable to a totalitarian state. Ban these people. Why? Because we say they are bad. Want proof? Too bad. We just have to blindly believe what you say.

RMTs are from all over the world. Sure, some come from China/Korea, but what of the ones in America? Japan? Europe? If you want to be fair, you must ban ALL people who play this game since we all have the possibility to be RMT. I heard that people are PM'd about this. Just ban those people. Most people here are smart enough not to buy gil. What of the users that do, and listen to the RMT? What will they do? Just search it up and still get it. What's stopping them?

In my eyes, it's wrong to ban an entire group of people for the actions of some. What about those that DONT trade money? They get cut off from a community. People say that this happens in Japan or China. Guess what? I'm pretty sure this site isn't run from either of those countries. What should we do about RMTs here? Keep up what we are doing. Mods are doing a great job already. These are unnecessary steps to fix a mostly-fixed problem.

Hopefully someone will understand what I'm saying.

[Feba]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

So you're proposing that AKsyogin list a bunch of IPs? You do realize that, in a lot of places, that's illegal, right?

This is a preventative measure. The administration CANNOT ban all new accounts before they get the chance to advertise. They CAN ban the majority of them ahead of time.

Keep in mind that this site doesn't support Chinese or Korean anyway, and was very much intended for NA users only (Specifically, NA users importing the JP client before it was released stateside)

[Taskmage]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

No, the saying I was thinking of was something like "a duck looks graceful and serene floating across a pond, but you don't see its feet pedaling furiously under the water." Something like that. Point being that you see very little RMT ad spam on this site because the admins, mods and a group of resonsible posters are working very hard behind the scenes to delete the posts and ban the spammers as soon as they show up.

Actually, this site is intended to be multinational even though it was originally created by/for NA importers. We have a respectable amount of EU posters and some JPs that visit. The fact is though, of the accounts we end up banning for RMT posts, I'd say 95% of the IPs trace to the IP blocks AKosygin decided to ban, whereas we have very few if any legitimate users from there.

These guys are very persistent. Once we get one spammer, they usually create a new account at least once every day to circumvent our banning of their accounts, hopping from IP to IP within a network until eventually we're forced to block the entire region. If not for taking preventative measures like that, this site would be flooded with advertisements that our mod team would simply not be able to keep up with. This is not speculation. This is something we've been dealing with daily.

[Neomage]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

Nice Job with the blanket IP bans. One thing I have always liked about FFXIO is that even though RMT exist(ed) here, when one was caught every record of their existance was wiped from public eyes... where as at "other" websites, when a RMT ad appeared it took ~3 days to get the user banned... and even then their posts advertising RMT remained behind for all to view >.>

[KamuroIshigami]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

Ok, I don't have a very big name on these forums, but I'm going to have to stand up. You are banning people from China or Korea from coming to this site just because of RMT issues? Then you say you cannot post proof that they are from China/Korea? I do not argue that most aren't from there, but you need to have proof. Post it. It's comparable to a totalitarian state. Ban these people. Why? Because we say they are bad. Want proof? Too bad. We just have to blindly believe what you say.

Please note that the cannot is not because I do not have the ability and not because I do not desire; but that I cannot because I am not allowed to by:
1.) Non-Disclosure Agreement
2.) Moral issues in regards to privacy of people's IPs.
3.) There are some legal limitations
4.) I do not have approval from PiNG (whom actually owns the site and data in all legal sense) to disclose such information.

My statistical proof that RMT trouble comes from PRC will require me to disclose information in which I am not allowed to disclose because of an NDA in which I am legally bound to. The most hint I can give you is that in my work, I see this and my work NDA prevents me from going into details.

The moral issues stems from the fact that amongst the bans, we have excluded some "holes" in the ranges because we have found legitimate posters there; and in order to prove that "most RMT people are from" a certain location requires me to disclose data in aggregate so you can see the big picture... but then that leaves the excluded ranges showing and that information may indirectly reveal certain member's posting locations and IPs based upon such aggregate data.

The legal limitations is that in some countries, releasing that kind of information is illegal, and another mod has already gotten flak for it by one of the users here. Do not want to repeat it again.

And lastly, PiNG has to authorize any release of such information as it is his site, his data, his rules. And I have no authorization to release that kind of information in such large volumes at such a scale to such requests openly.

RMTs are from all over the world. Sure, some come from China/Korea, but what of the ones in America? Japan? Europe? If you want to be fair, you must ban ALL people who play this game since we all have the possibility to be RMT. I heard that people are PM'd about this. Just ban those people. Most people here are smart enough not to buy gil. What of the users that do, and listen to the RMT? What will they do? Just search it up and still get it. What's stopping them?

I have yet to encounter a single account that has registered on this board that advertises RMT AND uses a Japanese IP address. As for the ones in America, we have more narrowly banned those and all the RMT violations using North American IP addresses are later discovered to be publicly known proxies. While Europe has a few single IP bans, but does not have persistent re-occuring registeration issues. Usually banning the account take care of those from Europe and they do not post again.

In my eyes, it's wrong to ban an entire group of people for the actions of some. What about those that DONT trade money? They get cut off from a community. People say that this happens in Japan or China. Guess what? I'm pretty sure this site isn't run from either of those countries. What should we do about RMTs here? Keep up what we are doing. Mods are doing a great job already. These are unnecessary steps to fix a mostly-fixed problem.

Hopefully someone will understand what I'm saying.

So far, everytime I ban an IP block from a particular ISP from a region, I take the entire block of IPs and check to see if any members match in that range. If there are not a single member in the IP range, then I ban it; otherwise, I either narrow it so that the member is not affected, or I limit it to a single IP, or I do not ban the block if a legitimate member seems to jump around in the segment of IP addresses.

So, I do not just blindly block, I usually run a quick check to make sure legitimate members are not there. However, I would like any users who know they are in that area to PM me, so I can make an extra note to make sure that you do not get caught by putting up notices to myself and the mods to ensure that you are left excluded from any bans.

I appreciate your concerns and they are noted. This will be taken into consideration when the time comes. Thank you.

[ItazuraNhomango]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

As long as there's an easy to use appeal process, and un-ban can happen quickly, I see no problem with this.

FFXI isn't sold in China or North Korea. This site doesn't have much info or discussion in either language--just common sense tells us that FFXIonline isn't a huge draw for legitimate users in China.

Personally, most "Chinese" national players I know are located in Hong Kong, U.S., and Australia anyway. (Sorry HK'ers. >_>; )

As long as the procedures are in place to handle the exceptions and handle them well, I'm all for saving the moderators/admins as much work as possible.

Just ... don't lump Taiwanese with China so casually. Please. >_>

[Jei]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

My best friend in FFXI was Taiwanese. We still remain very close friends to this day. And yea, he too lives primarily in the US.

[Kilandor]

Re: Enactment of Regional Access Prohibition

Actually Being an Admin Myself, I see nothing wrong with Global Bans, Sure it knocks people out, but you know, Like my site a week ago, Got spammed up by some asshole(sorry) that spammed up 150+ posts till I happend to login and stop him, or he woulda never stop till he posted in every thread.

I've had this problem happen all the time, along with Turkish script kiddies, who frequently attack the forum system I use (along with ffxidats)

What most of you don't see is from an admin's side, of all the logs, of things that happen etc, and what not.

I will likely start, doing global ban's myself soon enough.

But Hey on my site, when I get some RMT punk, I post his info, but I can understand why he cannot, due to NDA etc, (But no clue why he had to sign a NDA anyways???)