Traditionally, WormNET bots other than those approved by higher-ranking members of the community (such as Deadcode and CyberShadow) have not been allowed unless communicated in advance. The rules have since then been relaxed, limited to "as long as nobody complains about your bot, you can run it". The recent bot wave has prompted negative reactions from the community and below I'll explain some of the reasons.
Spamming the channel:
- Does not reach the promotion goal because people who are supposed to be targeted, leave and join within a short timespan. They never get to see or read the message. Additionally, the message shows up in gray, which does not bring sufficient attention to it.
- People who do stay in channels for longer already know, get their backlog spammed, and do not wish to see the messages again. The community is expanding, a lot of which is on Discord, with most of the people getting their information on leagues and other things from outside of the game. With the recently-added Discord bridge, people are forced to set up filters to eliminate the spam which they shouldn't have to do.
Clearly we need some guidelines for promoting a static service (such as a league website). So, going forward, the following rules are going to be enforced:
- Promotion of the same type of content via private message (PM) once per day for each unique nickname running the default WA client - on join or a while after join. Private message arrives instantly and guarantees the recipient has seen it. Channel is not spammed. The language must be friendly and the links promoted free of any fraud.
- Promotion to snooper users is limited to once per week.
- Promotion of no more than two additional distinct types of content allowed per the above rules. Any additional bot aliases for the same bot (if used) must be communicated to Worms developers.
- Promotion on #AnythingGoes: allowed for events that are taking place within 2-3 hours, such as tournaments. Please leave at least 20 minutes of room between each message.
- Be aware that while private messages do not have anti-flood as strict as #AnythingGoes does, there is still a tangible limit on the amount of data you send via PMs in a short timespan. It is your own responsibility to design algorithms respecting this limit.
If any of the above is violated and/or reports from users are received on such violations, the bot may be terminated. If you are using WebSnoop, be aware that you risk losing access to WormNET services (such as HostingBuddy) as the result.
These rules are not yet enforced, however you are to expect this to be the case in the near future. This post will be updated when they are finalized and this starts getting enforced on WormNET. As time passes, some of the limits may be expanded upon. A wiki article will soon be created for this as well.
KradieBot received a short ban as a warning in anticipation of these upcoming guidelines.
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