Watchout for fake GMs

[Yrgav]

Greetings,

today there's been yet another case of GM impersonation on SimplyRO. Its pattern was almost identical to that of previous cases from a variety of servers, including TalisRO and FantastikRO.

Players should be especially wary of the line break-trick in chat rooms and being asked to add the fake GM on skype. Server owners might want to warn their players to prevent unnecessary grief.

[rasetsu]

RoFLoL this has been the trend in RO today. It is a pity that people fall for the same trick all over again, the Chat Box technique was simple and bustable. If players would only study how the Chat Box work.

[Oniichan]

haha yeah, i heard many stories about fantastikRO and talisRO.
Although, you don't really need a fake GM when the admins of both the servers always has a fake mask on XP.

Btw, this thread is a few months old rasetsu xD

[yC]

Looking back at the two topics.  The conversation were horribly similar in a way.  The line-break trick, I just realize what rasetsu mean. 

I was a little confused when watching this video http://truero.com/f/index.php?topic=589.0..  Nicely demonstrated, would be great if there is a text explanation of what really goes on in the video.  Given I don't play the game everyday, watching it the first time I was thinking how come the two GMs in the chat room talking when only 2/20 is shown.  -.- so it was just that guy talking with "hmm" then a "GM name: text" on the next line.  Silly me *feels stupid for not noticing*

I hope more people can be aware of it.  No harm giving this issue a little more publicity.

[Zhin]

Nah this happens everywhere, and they think they're being clever. But I've had a lot of people get fooled by it, which is surprising. I don't know how you wouldn't question why the other person's talking every time lol. Still, yeah, it's a good thing to tell your players. Remind them that you'll never ask them for account info, there's no reason to accept files from anyone on Skype, we have no need for your credit card info. That's the best one. Should report them to the police when they try to get CC info, but with the internet being what it is, it's hard to get people in trouble for things like that.

So, yeah, just be careful and watch what you're doing and who you're talking to. GMs [usually] have yellow text and names and a special sprite, always ask for them to prove that they're legit before you let them talk you into something.

[Seffi ❤]

If you put a limit on the amount of characters you can type in a chatrooms this issue can actually be avoided entirely. Makes it not impossible to use the link-brick thing.

[Tokeiburu]

These tricks are very, very old...! Anyhow, might as well be a good idea to remind GMs never to use I, L or m in their names, to avoid easy impersonations.

The line-break trick is not really applicable to chatrooms anyway, it's obvious to see wheter or not there's a GM in it and most people have different sized chat boxes, which make this trick fail. Private messages is better (assuming they're not using 1:1 chat boxes, but I haven't seen many people using that!).

You can do this trick anywhere too... guild chat (to impersonate a guild leader, heh), an afk party chat member, always had a blast with that one : "Alright I'm back, let's go!". Main chat is doable as well, just make sure you don't mess up and hope the GMs aren't paying too much attention to it. Usually though, the GMs just join in and have fun, but that depends of the servers I guess.

The only way to fully stop this is to change the text limit or make a somewhat complex source modification.

[rasetsu]

In short, GMs enter chatbox the normal way. If a GM name suddenly butt in the conversation clearly look at whether their name was listed in your PUB, if not, it is time to use @request on a GM(if anyone is online) and report the sheet out of that nuub 

[heRO-GM]

The modification is not that hard, actually, like this one here will make it very hard to use that trick again

[NovaRagnarok]

This was just attempted over at NovaRO as well. Beware :[

[yC]

Once you know it's a bad scam you'd think people will never fall for this dumb thing.  But this trick attack two weaknesses on people that make it "successful":

1) Players may think GM's name don't have to show up in the list of name to talk in chat box.

2) When (you think) a GM is talking, you tend to ignore whoever is also talking at the same time.


Best to prevent is to make people aware of how it's done so they are well informed before they fall into the trap.  That server side plugin/patch linked by heRO-GM is nice too.

(Moving this to server discussion).

[Rider]

Leave it to AnnieRuru to make a fix for fun

It should work fine for most, you can ignore the plugin code since that is only for Hercules. You can increase the number of spaces in ( message, "    " ) if you don't want a chat to be blocked just because someone typed 3 consecutive spaces. 

[yC]

Some kind of mod like that should be included as an on/off feature in the rA/Hercules package for easy fix.  I wonder if they can do this on the official server too.  But we know rarely any GM is visible on the official server nobody will because you are a GM there anyway.

[Rider]

Hercules have it as a plugin, so it's easy as turning it on or off.

Official servers might not care enough to add something like this anytime soon. They could've fixed RO ages ago and added bot filters and prevented packet encryption which private servers have managed to do.