In recent weeks, a number of our members have decided greeting people new to the server is a hardship they should not have to endure.  These users (notably chantea, SmallbearsCraft, and BigPigFootsie, though I am confident there are others) have created powertools for themselves to explain our rules to these users.  In itself, this is obviously not a problem, however, these users do not wait for someone to be confused before using these tools, instead choosing to use them whenever anyone new joins the server instantly.

I argue this is spam and should be outlawed, I have a few reasons for this and some possible solutions.

Reason 1: This is one of the major reasons we had to ban IRC bots speaking in public, that people would make bots to auto-greet users, which quickly became annoying spam.  This is essentially repeated now, especially with chantea, who seems to never fail to press his powertool, even if a person has just joined, then jumped to school and joined for the first time there, and this problem is accentuated when more than one of these individuals is online, creating a veritable wall of spam.

Reason 2: I feel that this is not a good greeting to new members as they join the server.  Instead of seeing things like "welcome!", they are instead assaulted with demands to perform a command or visit our website, or some list of things we do not accept (chantea: "we do not accept piston doors, or pulse extenders for [Builder]").  I personally would prefer these users simply shut up if they can't be  bothered to be nice.

Reason 3: The only thing any of these messages can say is to either "do /motd" - which already automatically shows when someone joins the server, or to go to our website - which is in the motd, which, as I said, automatically shows up for new visitors.

Finally, I have made my case quite clear, even to the point of telling people like chantea  outright that I found his behavior to not be acceptable and that if it continued I would look in to preventing it - so I know reasoning does not work.
Therefore, in conclusion and for these reasons, I feel that something needs to be done about these pseudo-auto join messages that have been spammed recently, and as for what I have 3 solutions.


Solution 1: Simply outlaw this type of message, don't change any permissions or mechanics, and make the behavior bannable.

I think this is my preferred solution, we make an announcement and then have mods/admins enforce no spammy auto-join messages


Solution 2: Mechanically prevent powertools from emitting chat messages

This involves less work from mods/admins on enforcement, but I don't know if this is possible or how easy it is.  There also may be legitimate uses for chat powertools, though I cannot think of any.


Solution -1: No, Tyler, you're insane.  We need more people to take up the auto-join message torch.



I have attached a poll  to these solutions' effect - please do let me know if you have some other solution, I'm always open to ideas.