Changes Made to the BobRTC Phonebook

Greetings!

We have made some dramatic changes to the BobRTC Phonebook which will change how you experience it.

We have divided the Phonebook into four shifts based on the time in New York City, which is what most Indian scammers are targeting when they're calling USA-based phone numbers. That is because >50% of the USA's population is located in the East Coast.

The four shifts are as follows:

**Peak** - BobRTC displays the phonebook as normal

**Pre-peak** - The phonebook will display the normal hot list, but with a warning reminding you that it's not peak yet, so you may have to do hunting

**Post-peak** - The phonebook will display the normal hot list, but with a warning reminding you that off-peak service is about to start

**Off-peak** - The default display will only contain phone numbers that are tagged 24-Hours. You must manually flip over to another search type to see other numbers.

*If you spot a phone number where the scammer is answering it after 8PM in the NYC time zone (GMT-5) but it is not tagged as a 24-hour number, please go to the #NumberLobby channel on IRC and tell a moderator. You can contact any BobRTC phonebook moderator you know.*

**XP Farming Search** - XP farming is fun to do, doesn't require you to use your voice and you can rack up lots of coins for tolled number dialing. One nasty side effect of it is that XP farming artificially pushes results in the phonebook to the top. To address this, we will now segregate XP farming numbers to their own search screen and remove them from the Hot list.

These phone numbers will now be tagged with a tractor emoji 🚜 to remind you that it's a farming number. Only toll-free numbers have the potential to be a farming number.

While you can call any number you want in the BobRTC phonebook, keep in mind that a farming number likely won't get a scammer talking on the phone if someone else is presently farming it.

I should have said this separately in the announcement…

If you are aware of a scammer that answers 24-hours a day, please raise the attention of a moderator in the #NumberLobby channel in IRC, or hit one up in Discord (the TLS Discord under bobrtc-questions).

Phonebook moderators have the ability to tag a number as 24-hours so it shows up in the off-peak display.

The same goes for XP farming numbers. If a number is popular for XP farming, ask a phonebook moderator to tag the number with the little tractor. This has the added benefit of removing the number from the Hot display so that it won't appear at the top of the last numbers that answered. This was a source of complaints that the top numbers on BobRTC were usually those being actively farmed.