The biggest complaint about BobRTC by far is about the numbers. We get it. We're also very aware that loads of scammers are trying to get their filthy hands into the site, and combine them with some individuals who aren't really scambaiters but spend more of their time disrupting other scambaiters---it's not an easy problem to tackle.
Let's address some of these points:
The most common complaint is wishing to dismiss numbers that are not working. I've seen complaints like this come in at 2AM in the New York Time zone, for a USA or Canadian phone number, including 6AM as well. Scammers know that their ploys don't work very well at oddball hours, and they do have to spend money to do robocalling campaigns. So it's not surprising that the volume of working numbers is going to dwindle GREATLY after 7PM. There is no realistic way of auto-sensing when a number is truly down forever or the scammer just went to bed.
If you take PTS as an example, they keep testing the waters and turning their numbers back on. Since we moved their numbers to highest-priority--they don't stay up very long before they shut them back off. If we delete PTS's numbers because they're not answering---are you going to have to enter them back in when they come back on? Even with user-side ignore... a lot of phone numbers that are down at night but up during the day you would be choosing to ignore.
We do have one idea to get around this but it doesn't seem ideal either, which is to have an indicator that a scammer is answering and then hope scambaiters flag it as answering as they're dialing. I would reckon that most people will ignore the feature.
To that end, we do have an idea on the drawing board which is to present different views based on what time it is in New York so that non USA/CAN users can be more familiar with what time it is and what the projected volumes of scams are at that time. We do have EU and AUS phone numbers available to call but they go down pretty fast, just as fast as USA/CAN numbers.
So the idea for off-peak scambaiting is to push certain classes of numbers to the very top---numbers that you should already know by heart. For instance CheapFlightsFares should always be a place you turn to when there's nothing else available to call.
Another big sore point is the quality of submitted numbers. We have been battling with several users since launch over their submissions. We now have yet another user that claims to be a scambaiter who is now sending us threats---all because none of the people who curate the phonebook found a single number he submitted to be credible or worthy of calling.
You shouldn't take it so personally when a number you submitted is deleted. Sometimes numbers are removed by accident and we've had a couple of those, but nearly all the ones that we've deleted tested bad. As in: it did not go to a scammer.
The decision to set a 580XP limit before phonebook entries are available to be submitted by users proved to be a sound decision. The first two weeks after launch we had to stop working and do nothing but calling and deleting numbers. One user finally discovered that every time he entered in a phone number of a McDonald's franchise that would hit a tripwire in the code and all his XP and call tokens would erase and his account would was automatically banned. We've since added over 30+ more tripwires like this and we are adding more.
Finally there are the "edge case" scams. These are scams that the scammer.info community for the longest time has mostly avoided, namely Craigslist scams and certain inter-person scams such as that. You should already know when buying/selling/responding on Craigslist that you should have your "stranger danger" hat on when going on that site. People who can't seem to realize this---we can't help them. And wiping out someone's T-Mobile phone is not really going to stop them from posting more bullshit listings on Craigslist, is it? That's not what we're here for and BobRTC is not either.
That's also why we have additional bot filtering examining the number you submitted for clues that it's not going to a scam call center.
The BobRTC motto should be taken seriously; it's a platform for fighting *telephone fraud*. Namely scams that require a telephone as part of conducting the scam. Things that are not scams or things that the community wouldn't care to work are not going to be allowed on BobRTC. Given that entries are examined through automation and then through hand-testing, we're going to insist that those requirements be enforced.
No amount of screaming, no amount of bellyaching and no amount of vacuous threats are going to lower the bar of what we will accept or reduce what we reject.
Persist and you will be shadowbanned. Raise it up a notch and you will be formally banned and when your alts are discovered they will be banned in turn.
Instead of playing that game---go beg someone for their disused FireRTC account or go back to TextNow if the rules of BobRTC are too strict for you, or crack open some manuals, learn how to code and go build your own dialer platform. BobRTC is meant to provide a service that's beneficial and effective; it's not a personal play toy, and neither is it owned by any particular scambaiter or scambaiting content creator with a fan club that's constantly at war with other scambaiters.
We ain't got time for that shit.