Random private messages for games I don't really know

Recently I have been getting private messages from games I don’t play anymore, or games I just tried out and they are form people I don’t even know or spoken before to on chat. I don’t mind this if it is for a game that I play often but most the time it will be a game I don’t really know.

The reason I posted this is because it wasn’t so annoying just getting them once every so often but today I received 2 messages with a period of around 1 hour 30 between them. (http://imgur.com/IBiaI)

I often talk to a few people over pm and when I see a notification on the top I think they have messaged me but it feels annoying when it is just spam.

Any suggestions on how to stop this or ways to prevent this would be nice to know of.

Hmm, that’s odd. For now, I would recommend selecting “delete” on the post and then “block user”. This should prevent it from happening again.

Originally posted by Zshadow:

Hmm, that’s odd. For now, I would recommend selecting “delete” on the post and then “block user”. This should prevent it from happening again.

no… it happens to me to,
and i thought this was intentional?

It’s also happening to me. I remember someone posting saying that it’s behaviour encouraged by MMOs so the person gets rewards.

That kinda is annoying, just got another one from some random user. Is there some way that the game sends out messages or is it the users themselves doing it

Originally posted by 007gard:

That kinda is annoying, just got another one from some random user. Is there some way that the game sends out messages or is it the users themselves doing it

It is kind of both. The games(at least berserk, one of the suspect games, does as I looked) has an invite friend button which also has a search function, to search all users on Kong. However I have absolutely no idea why people are using the invite random people thing, as far as I could see you don’t get anything from it.

Several games are now featuring “spam random people for rewards” functions.

Fucking.
Ban.
It.

I feel it is a way to advertise games, even when they are pretty dead, the people still playing might just spam random invites to get the game more population

In the last 24 hours I’ve gotten 3: “Lets fight each other in Survival of the Fittest!” and 2: “I’ve been playing a game called Wild West Town. I think you’d like it too, give it a try!”

Wouldn’t be an issue if I didn’t have the Kongregate mobile app on my phone. It notifies me every time I get spammed…

me too, facebook was terrible for this, one of the reasons I wasn’t overly upset when I got hacked and could no longer access the games through my fb account, I miss interacting with folk I actually know, sure, but I won’t miss the encouraged spam at all.
I really hope Kong gets a heavy foot on top of this issue, SOON

Originally posted by 007gard:

I feel it is a way to advertise games, even when they are pretty dead, the people still playing might just spam random invites to get the game more population

This is correct, it’s something you can’t exactly stop.. Simply ignoring it seems to be the only option at the moment.

I feel if their friend played that game they could try and merge the persons friends list to playing it, or just ask the people on your friends list if they want to be your friend on that game. But not just random people. I would be fine if you had to play X amount of hours on a game to be signed up for this but not just like a 10 min try out

I just accidentally blocked an actual friend because I was going through deleteblocking so much spam too fast. This really needs to stop, like, MONTHS AGO.

(Also I don’t know how to unblock someone. Any help?)

Originally posted by Arvedui:

I just accidentally blocked an actual friend because I was going through deleteblocking so much spam too fast. This really needs to stop, like, MONTHS AGO.

(Also I don’t know how to unblock someone. Any help?)

http://www.kongregate.com/accounts/Arvedui/blocked

Came on today and saw 2 of the spam messages, both from 2 hours ago

i get spam from games that i play…
and there is no reward…

If they are gonna force ads onto everyone, atlease give a reward for putting up with it,say like ‘Play this game and get X amount of stuff’

Originally posted by 007gard:

If they are gonna force ads onto everyone, atlease give a reward for putting up with it,say like ‘Play this game and get X amount of stuff’

Kong doesn’t make the ads. Advertisers buy the slots that the ads are displayed in, probably per 1k impressions. So Kong can’t just put game ads there. They’re depriving themselves of potential income. Considering the games are utilizing both viral and spammy methods for attracting new players, I highly doubt they’d be willing to fork over any money for ad slots.

This is something that started fairly recently and Kongregate really needs to KILL this functionality. I don’t want the goddamn spam. I’ve blocked about 8 people for it so far and they just keep coming.

Originally posted by PsychoticGnome:

Originally posted by 007gard:

If they are gonna force ads onto everyone, atlease give a reward for putting up with it,say like ‘Play this game and get X amount of stuff’

Kong doesn’t make the ads. Advertisers buy the slots that the ads are displayed in, probably per 1k impressions. So Kong can’t just put game ads there. They’re depriving themselves of potential income. Considering the games are utilizing both viral and spammy methods for attracting new players, I highly doubt they’d be willing to fork over any money for ad slots.

I feel the spam to be classed as ads honestly, as they are trying to get me to play the game with ‘Play now’ formatted into the message.

Originally posted by 007gard:

Originally posted by PsychoticGnome:

Originally posted by 007gard:

If they are gonna force ads onto everyone, atlease give a reward for putting up with it,say like ‘Play this game and get X amount of stuff’

Kong doesn’t make the ads. Advertisers buy the slots that the ads are displayed in, probably per 1k impressions. So Kong can’t just put game ads there. They’re depriving themselves of potential income. Considering the games are utilizing both viral and spammy methods for attracting new players, I highly doubt they’d be willing to fork over any money for ad slots.

I feel the spam to be classed as ads honestly, as they are trying to get me to play the game with ‘Play now’ formatted into the message.

Yeah, but to be traditional ads costs money, so instead of spending money the game devs are using PMs to spam.

sneaky devs, but still should be dealt with. I feel it is also a way to bypass K+ no ads too

If you receive a message from a user, for example, “Come fight me in Survival of the Fittest! Play Now” and you are uninterested and don’t want to hear about this game anymore, simply pull up the game and select “block game” as seen below:

I know it’s a few clicks on your side, but it does help refine which games you do and don’t want to hear from. It’s imperfect, we know, but as the site continues to grow and expand with exciting new features we will work on making it so you do have a choice. The main reason we have everyone opted into this is so that no one is unaware that the feature of the site exists. It’s easy to opt out of something you don’t enjoy, but it’s a lot more difficult to get people to check something out or use a feature if they don’t even know it exists.

I am posting to declare that from now on any game generating these SPAM messages AUTOMATIC 1 RATING from me.

I strongly advise everyone else to adopt the same policy. If Kongregate refuses remove this spam functionality then we users need to make it clear to game devs that WE won’t tolerate spam.

P.S. Zshadow, I don’t mean to dump the flame on you personally, but I hope you’ll understand that this is a SPAM problem and the flames are going be roasting anyone who willingly steps into the line of fire. I will try to set the flamethrower for minimum-roast. Your initial suggestion to block individual users associated with each spam messages was a very… ill considered proposal. Your new suggestion to block individual games associated with each spam message was an equally… ill considered proposal.

The entire point of a SPAM problem is that it is completely unreasonable and completely insane to even suggest every person “merely” block each individual sender-address one by one.

Seriously, there are how many millions of user accounts on Kong? And there are how many tens of thousands of games on Kong? You basically suggested that every person on Kong who doesn’t want to receive spam should block each of tens of thousands of games one at a time? Not only that, but each and every person on Kong who doesn’t want to receive spam would need needs to click and block, one by one, HOW MANY new games each and every day?

Thus far it’s only a small number of games on Kong generating these spams. However I think that would be a rather shortsighted reason to trivialize a spam problem. I think Kong needs to take action to stomp this out now, while it’s a small amount of spam being generated by only a handful of problem games. The absolute minimum acceptable solution is a “BLOCK GAME” option that extents tor ALL games at once.