.ticket onlinelist; .ticket online

I've recently assisted in a great increase in people spamming ".ticket onlinelist" and ".ticket online" constantly in guild chats (many toons, many guilds on both alliance and horde) side.
They just keep spamming those two commands constantly in guild chats and nothing else.

At first I tried to contact them, because I thought it was maybe a wrong addon or macro spamming the message continuously.
But none of the toons contacted ever replied. They don't answer to messages, they don't accept party or raids invites, they just keep spamming those 2 messages in guild chat.
This is the typical behavior of a bot.

I searched online for those 2 commands and both are GMs commands, they are used to look for and reply to tickets, but it seems pretty strange to me that an active character, even if used by a GM, would never reply to whispers or interact with other players at all.

I tried to file a ticket online saying that I suspected one of them of being a bot (I didn't have screenshots at the time), and the GM answered that they have "insufficient info" to ban said toon for botting.
That answer seemed strange to me and I interpreted it as a confirmation that those toons spamming commands are not in fact GMs: if a GM were receive a ticket about another GM, wouldn't he just recognize that he is in fact a GM? I guess he would have replied something more like "that's not a bot command, its a GM" or something.

Now, I wouldn't have made this post if it wasn't for a sharp increase in the last month I saw about those, which made me think that it could be a new kind of bot or something.

Stab in the dark: this is a player who is a GM in another server and is playing with the same set of addons here.

It could be.
But:
- I've seen at least 3/4 of them in the last month, which is a weirdly high number of people sharing the same addons and being gm on other servers.
However, it seems very possible that they do share the same addon/program/whatever.

- they never reply to anything, it does not look like there is someone behind them, they just spam those messages for hours.

Botting seems a safer guess if you ask me.

EDIT: Oh, another thing to add is that all these toons are in starting guilds, the kind of guilds that spam for newbies on the server that kind of spam invites to everybody, so it also seems pretty reasonable that they inadvertently accepted the guild invite due to an automatic script.

It does look pretty odd and specific, although it also wouldn't make much sense for bots. It's something that attracts attention and has no effect otherwise, not regular player behavior like they would want to look like. Not replying to anything is nothing unusual, though. Unless I'm in a manually formed party, with guild people or looking for something, I close/minimize/remove any player communication in all MMOs, leaving just system messages and NPC dialogues. My interest in chatting with randoms is zero, I'm there to play the game.

What you say is reasonable, though my idea is that they set up the bot and accidentally got that script among the others, probably cause the bot script was written for a private setup server with GM powers or something like that.
The guy I screenshotted today was in ICC and has been there for many hours the whole day.
Others were generally just in Icecrown and lower level dungeons.

That's possible, but were they doing anything actually bot-like, though?
Not weird or unusual or nonsense, but something you could say a bot would profit from doing?

Find if they do anything in-game like moving. Do they sit by AH/Mailbox? Is this "spam" coming at regular time intervals?

I can't say for sure nor be able to prove anything.
Well, to be honest, I don't think there is any real way for a player to prove with certainty that another player is botting even when all the signs are there.
The only thing I can do is take screens or record and report them and maybe a GM could go there in person and give a look.

I can only guess based on these facts:
- at least in 4 different occasions, different people, guilds, factions and toons,
- same scripted command lines repeated over and over for hours everytime in guild chat,
- in guild nobody knew them, everybody asked them to stop both in guild chat and whispers,
- they never replied, never accepted party or raid invites but continued to spam for hours,
- I googled the lines and I found no common addon or software that uses them, nor people commenting about those people spamming commands,
- I wrote this post and (for now) I seem to be the first person in bringing attention to it,

I can guess:
- some people were using the same software/addons,
- the software is not that common,
- the software seems to malfunction in someway, but it hasn't really been changed,
- while using those softwares people may have been asleep at the wheel (how else you won't notice hours of your own spamming nor peoples whispers/invites),

More specifically, I think the last person I took screens was bot farming ICC.
Another one I think was bot leveling (around lvl 65 in dungeons).

I was hoping in someone replying and saying that it's a common error from an addon or something like that here.
I've also made another ticked and linked to this 3d, but unless a GM gives a look at that account when those people are online, I don't think there are other possibilities for normal players like me to inspect them somehow.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OhieMitzen

Find if they do anything in-game like moving. Do they sit by AH/Mailbox? Is this "spam" coming at regular time intervals?

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I couldn't reach last 2 people because they were instanced.
They didn't accept party invites anyway so I don't know how I could have find them exactly.

I also didn't check the intervals but they seemed pretty regular, like:
- .ticket onlinelist every minute or so;
- .ticket online followed the first command by a couple of seconds.