It's been 3 months since we've launched! Wanted to give an update on where the project is going.
First thing is first: We have had a catastrophic failure of one of our support servers due to some bad configuration and then hardware issues. This is impacting IRC and the recording subsystem. Both are going to be down for the next few days. We have disabled BobRTC recordings on everyone's accounts for now as the server handling the transcoding work is out of service.
Luckily however we have refactored the recording system fundamentals and our tests showed it working much more reliably than the older system that relied on watching the file system.
Sunday evening we will issue an update to DialParty which should fix an issue with the GUI not reacting even though multiple calls are being placed. In this case the communications path between servers was over private websockets which wasn't the best method for doing a massive amount of small events across a large number of processes.
Some of you may have noticed that we are building bots to assist with BobRTC inquiries from within IRC and Discord. As we have grown the development team we have more skills to help with this.
Also, starting this evening we are going to place the Phonebook into a state of "shifts". These shifts are, in the NYC (US East) time zone:
Off-peak 1900-0800
Pre-peak 0800-1000
Peak 1000-1700
Post-peak 1700-1900
The phonebook is going to change looks for each one of the four shifts we happen to be in. Off-peak you will be sent to a phonebook search that displays the scammers known to work 24-hours and late-night. Phonebook Moderators will be tagging these numbers and also removing tags if a scammer has given up handling overnight calls.
Pre and Post peak is going to remind you that you are coming into or going out of the peak scamming time. Generally, scammers start their robodialing campaigns during pre-peak and it ramps up to very heavy volume by 10AM each morning, then drops like a rock around 4PM while they stay open to take callbacks through 7PM. That's the general overall-trend. We will only change the default search screen from Peak to Off-peak for now and see if that helps BobRTC users who are in Europe, Asia and Australia.
Features on the drawing board:
*Phonebook Feedback* - When we first introduced the phonebook we ended up with a significant amount of trash numbers. We fought this off with a large moderator team and raising requirements to enter numbers and a significant amount of code to auto-detect problematic users including outright trip-wires on certain behavior that auto-bans people. Yet an existing issue remains and that is that scammers don't activate their phone numbers forever. They turn them off and back on, sometimes going days before they'll answer a number again (look at PTS). Not everyone is as dedicated as CheapFlightsFares is to answering every scambait call. But it is still annoying to work a number that is down.
Because scammers want to see their numbers removed from the phonebook, having negative indicators isn't the wisest idea. However positive indicators gives scammers no motivation to give poisoned feedback. Limiting when positive feedback can be given (like, let's say... after 30 seconds in on a call) can help with reducing poisoned data. A fading positive feedback where the feedback has an effectiveness that drops off with time and the phonebook sortable by that feedback state.
*XP Farmers* - We need the feedback on a phone number dial card split between numbers that are genuinely human-answered and those numbers which are being used for XP farming. People wanting to talk to a scammer aren't interested in dialing a number that already has 50 calls going against it. The current state of the phone switches can be inspected to judge whether a number is being farmed and change the dial card visual to reflect that it's being farmed right now.
*Anonymous Inbound Calls* - BobRTC, like NomoRobo and RoboKiller has a honeypot pool of inbound phone numbers that are forwarding to us. Right now all the calls are being answered by random bots. We intend to deflect these calls onto logged-in users (with an option if you want to opt-out) to answer them. These are robocalls from dialers coming from everywhere. Often they are debt collectors. The numbers the dialers are calling do not currently belong to any telephone subscriber.
Features still up for discussion:
*Personal conferencing* - This is a feature where you can maintain an open conference bridge which other BobRTC users can elect to join, even participate, and then add a scammer to the bridge so that everyone can talk to the scammer. This is basically what you can do using Discord voice chat and a second computer dialed in to a scammer, except placing a dialer on to VC is technically complex.
*DID numbers* - This feature is an enhancement off Anonymous Inbound that allows full-blown inbound answering to route to individual BobRTC users. This feature is problematic in that it would require us to comply with FCC rules regarding assigned DID numbers (a directory of subscribers must be kept, which can be inspected or released to law enforcement/regulatory authorities upon request). Essentially this means we cannot offer this service unless we require you to pay for it ($2/mo) and we'd have to keep on file an email address (verified by ping-ponging a verification link), and that record would be subjected to discovery either in a civil lawsuit, a criminal lawsuit, or an investigative case.
As we know some scammers use the legal hammer and they will run to law enforcement with verkakte claims of lethal-threats and harassment, which eventually some of those claims could turn into subpoenas.
One way around this (and it's far easier to code)... is to have a new User Preference for you to put your TextNow or Google Hangouts number into BobRTC. For it to be accepted we would send a robot to call the number, you answer it and read the digits the robot gives you to have it save. Then if you want scammers to call you back we can put your TextNow on an outbound call. This of course would put the risk back on to you, and to TextNow or Google.