Ran "repair" and restarted the game. It did not fix the problem.

I have been levelling a couple of my non-vet toons during the New Life festival. It's a lot more than normal for me, but probably not nearly as much as some folks.

I can whisper and talk in guild chat, but do not have access to guild banks or the guild store from a bank. Not sure about zone chat.

Day 3 of problem.

If you haven't already, submit a ticket to ZOS and explain that you are GM of a guild. This issue happens frequently to GM's when mailing their guilds.

Day 5 of the social ban.

If this looks like it will persist through Sunday, I will probably hand off guild leadership so someone can run the trader--but I will be done with guilds. This is absolutely ridiculous. ZOS obviously does not want us to be able to manage the guild.

Day 6 of the social ban.

This reply is intended to be a heads-up to anyone who uses mail addons to communicate with their guilds.
While these addons are not banned, The ZoS position is that by using them, you run the risk of a social ban if something in your mail hits the automated tripwire in place to prevent Gold Seller spam.


@Argleblaster,

This is indeed a "social ban". It basically stops an account from interacting with anyone in any way beyond within a guild.

It includes:

- Cannot send mail
- Cannot send whispers (they never get sent even though it appears so)
- Cannot access guild store
- Cannot access guild bank
- Cannot speak in group chat
- Cannot execute a trade

I've been aware (i learned the hard way, unfortunately) of the fact that certain words or ways of writing mass mail to your guild can trip the automatic "social ban" system.

The first time it happened to me, I had put the term "Power Level" in a raffle e-mail (when ambrosia first came out). Fair enough, if anything would trigger an automated script that would do it lol.

I hear stories every few weeks of this happening to other GM's/People who send mail to their guilds, I've never heard of anyone who didn't have it reversed upon appeal.

I am concerned that the number of social bans may be increasing or something may have been adjusted. You are the 5th social ban I'm aware of in the past 7 days. Or maybe it's just a run of bad luck.


Thoughts on avoiding Social Bans for e-mail:

- Avoid words and phrases that might be found in gold-seller e-mails. I referenced "Power-Level" above as the ultimate example. Our subject last week included the word "Deal"

- Avoid excessive capitalization. (?) Even after adjusting our raffle mail template and removing "Deal" from subject and body, we got another ban on another officer account. The only difference we could find from our normal weekly template was that for that particular mail, the list of prizes had been typed in ALL CAPS. And included "ONE MILLION GOLD".

- Sending the mails excessively fast can also be an issue, but the addons dedicated to this task (such as GodSend and MailR) seem to have proper timing.

When it comes to the task of blocking actual gold farmer e-mails, their script seems to do quite well, I never see gold selling spam mail.

But when it comes to GM's of highly active guilds trying to communicate with their membership, without any guidelines whatsoever (which is why I shared what I know above), it's Russian Roulette every time a mail is sent to your guild and it would be nice to have a solution to this.

One solution that has been put forth to ZoS in meetings with guilds:

- Provide a permission based guild mail system within the game. Right now, *anyone* with an addon can send guild mail.
- Then disable mass-mailer addon functionality. Love addons but this should be a core mechanic.

Also, any type of account restriction should include an immediate communication from ZoS to the player.
If there can be an automated script to restrict accounts, there can be an automated script to notify us instead of leaving your customer clueless and playing detective to figure out what happened.

Even better, flag the account to have a human look at the email, it would take seconds to distinguish a Gold Seller mail from a Guild raffle mail. Just sayin...

We completely understand that ZoS needs to battle gold seller spam and we support those efforts.
At the same time, there needs to be a more efficient way of dealing with innocents who get caught up in the net...and hopefully someday built-in permission-based guild mail.

-H

Argleblaster wrote: »

hiyde ,
I have been able to 'speak' in guild chat---fortunately. I was able to arrange to have someone put in a bid for our guild trader this week. I have also been able to use the officer's chat for the guild.

I agree with everything else you said. I even understand that ZOS needs a method of policing the mail system and battling gold sellers. I just think that it should not take seven days to fix the problem if the system makes a mistake.

Typo (fixed now). I meant to say can't speak in Group chat.

Guild Chat & Officer chat are about the only things one can do under a social ban. And yes a week is a long time. Sorry this still isn't resolved for you.

I've been made aware of two more social bans related to mail sending. That's now 7 GMs/Officers I know of in the past week, which makes me wonder if something has changed in their system to make it stricter.

Day 9 of the social bug. Until I am informed that I received a ban, how are we certain that this is not a bug?