[Solution] FFXIV Eating Your Posts!

[Verilys]

Hey all!

 

I haven't seen this anywhere before, so I thought I'd post my findings here. Apologies if this is a duplicate!

 

If you've role-played for any length of time in FFXIV, you've probably come across the peculiar issue where the game, for whatever reason, decides not to allow your post through. I've seen posts before guessing at the nature of thing, but nothing definitive -- some words would seem to cause it to happen, but only sometimes. I began compiling a list of these troublesome posts to try to get a common thread as to what the issue is. What I've found is pretty frustrating!

 

It's been speculated that it's a way SquareEnix will block gold spam and the like and this would seem to be the case. One phrase, in particular, seems to have a pretty high incidence of causing issues: COM. Words like 'compliment', 'competent' and 'common' would have a high incidence of causing posts to get eaten. For a time, my suggestion to people was to find these words and replace them with something else. This would would maybe about 80% of the time (I've not been rigorous on this). So, what about the cases were these words were not the problem? Well! This is where it gets silly. Check out the following:

 

"Ryuk told me that they're always looking for more staff here, so I thought I'd bring her down when I had the chance, to just check the place out. Maybe even offer to work here if they'll accept her."

 

This post doesn't contain any 'com' instances, but FFXIV eats it up just the same. So, what's the issue? Turns out, it IS 'com' after all. But in a different way:

 

"Ryuk told me that they're always looking for more staff here, so I thought I'd bring her down when I had the chance, to just check the place out. Maybe even offer to work here if they'll accept her."

 

Removing the red characters that form 'com' will render this post usable. So, you can have random whitespace, characters, etc., but if you have 'com' in your post (and something else that triggers it, not sure yet) it might not go through. Unfortunately, I don't yet know what differentiates posts that do go through and those that don't.

 

So! The solution. Pretty straightforward: replace all the 'o' characters in the post with 'ø' (Alt + 0248). This breaks the pattern. An alternative is to replace all the 'c' characters with '¢' (Alt + 0162), though FFXIV displays this a little uglier (but it works). It might not help you figure out if your post has gone through or not, but at least it makes the process of getting it through a bit easier.

 

tl;dr If your RP post gets eaten by the game, replace all the 'o' characters with 'ø' (Alt + 0248). i.e. "compliment" becomes "cømpliment". Alternatively, use '¢' (Alt + 0162) so that "compliment" becomes "¢ompliment".

[Aya]

Very interesting :-X

 

And very annoying!

[Verilys]

At least there's a way around it! I'd like to figure out a way of giving people a good indication of whether or not their post was likely to have gone through. But I'm lazy.

[LiadansWhisper]

If that is truly the issue, this has to be the dumbest excuse for a way to "fight" gil sellers that I've honestly ever seen.

[Faye]

Does this really work? It seems kinda farfetched, especially considering you can send actual URL's with a legit ".com" in them without issue.

[Verilys]

Absolutely works. I've been using the method for quite awhile now and someone mentioned I should probably share it, heh. Prrrretty bizarre. Whether or not my guess is correct as to why it works is pretty debatable, but I can't think of anything else as to why they would come up with something to block the posts. As an aside, other near-characters don't seem to work. Neither an accented 'c' (such as ç) or an accented 'o' will work.

 

That said, I'd be really interested in hearing if it doesn't work for someone! There's bound to be more potential data from an entire community than just my own experiences can handle.

[Maril]

I'm probably just going to continue writing normally, it seems very weird to replace letters like that. Especially o with ø (since its a part of my native tongue's alphabet). 

But it's nice to know. They really ought to try and fix it so it's not doing it as much as it is, because it's not just stuff in /say going missing, I've experienced /tells going missing too (which can lead to people thinking you're ignoring them).

[Verilys]

I'm probably just going to continue writing normally, it seems very weird to replace letters like that. Especially o with ø (since its a part of my native tongue's alphabet).

But it's nice to know. They really ought to try and fix it so it's not doing it as much as it is, because it's not just stuff in /say going missing, I've experienced /tells going missing too (which can lead to people thinking you're ignoring them).

 

Yar, that's typically what I do. I just replace it whenever we figure out that the post isn't going through. Then, instead of re-writing the entire thing or breaking it up into parts to try to figure what's wrong or asking random strangers for their Skype... I just replace all the offending letters.

 

And yeah, the same text will always get eaten -- no matter if it's in /say, /party, /tell, /shout, etc.

[Nebbs]

Interesting.

 

I await gill selling shouts with quirky o in

 

I don't really see much gil selling noise on Balmung so it must be working.

[Warren Castille]

It's weird that this works, because as Faye pointed out it is entirely possible to link actual websites with a ".com" in the text. If it's working for you that's amazing, but there has to be some other (stupid) flag being tripped by those posts. I can't make heads or tails of it, but...

 

How very very peculiar.

[Verilys]

It's weird that this works, because as Faye pointed out it is entirely possible to link actual websites with a ".com" in the text. If it's working for you that's amazing, but there has to be some other (stupid) flag being tripped by those posts. I can't make heads or tails of it, but...

 

How very very peculiar.

 

There absolutely is something else to it, but I can't figure it out with how (relatively) rarely it happens to me. Whatever it is though, it seems to be contingent on the 'com' occurrence. If everyone was to submit their own 'eaten posts' and I was able to build up a large enough bit of data, I could potentially do something with that. I probably couldn't find the exact key, but I could at the very least make something that says "Your post was x% likely to be eaten". Though I'd be hesitant to release something like that, on account of it potentially being used by the actual users it was meant to filter.

 

But yeah, it's not just 'com', otherwise there'd be a huge issue with RP (and chatting) in general. And linking things -- though, when you think about gold spam, the post isn't JUST a link. It's usually got some format of advertisement along with it and that's what they're likely trying to target here. You're probably looking at a combination of length of post, 'com', and other keywords in some order.