Babble

What is Babble?

Babble is a plugin originally designed to reduce the amount of emotes you receive during larger events. Later it has been developed to be able to filter words in other chat channels as well. The plugin was written by Simbo.

The plugin “filters” the chat channels you chose and sends only “allowed” messages to your chat window. In other words, the plugin excludes the chat messages you would rather not see. It comes with a predefined list of the “usual suspect” emotes from busy social events (dance, clap, cheer, etc.), which will be auto-removed and not shown in your chat window when Babble is enabled.

You can easily add to this list, or even remove those emotes you want to see. You can also set up lists of terms or messages to be filtered from other channels, not just the emote channel. Additionally, you can filter messages from different players, so you can still see all messages directed towards yourself or those delivered by your good friends.

How does it work?
Babble is notified whenever a message is received. If the message is not set to be “blocked”, the plugin sends the message to the “Standard” chat channel. This means that you need to do the following for the plugin to work:

• In Babble, select/enable the chat channels you want to filter.
• In your main chat window, turn off display of the same chat channels you want to filter. Just right-click on the chat window tab, and you’ll be able to choose which chat channels are displayed in that window.
• Make sure that the Standard channel is enabled.
• Then you will only receive the filtered messages from Babble in your chat window.

It is worth noting that the plugin cannot actually stop messages being received. You would still need to turn off the relevant channel from displaying in your chat window. The plugin is simply re-sending new, filtered, messages to your standard channel.

For filtering, Babble can use both “Allowed” messages and “Blocked” messages. For “Allowed” messages, Babble will allow through any message for the channel that matches a pattern in the list, and block everything else.

For “Blocked” lists, the following applies:

• If you tick the “Unless From” check box, then the message will be blocked UNLESS the message is from one of the names in the associated name list.
• If you tick the “Unless To” check box, the message will be blocked UNLESS any of the words in the message text matches a name in the list.

For “Allowed” lists, the opposite applies

• If you tick the “Unless From” check box, then the message will be allowed UNLESS the message is from one of the names in the associated name list.
• If you tick the “Unless To” check box, the message will be allowed UNLESS any of the words in the message text matches a name in the list.

Note that you can enter “Me” as a valid name, so you capture see both the messages you write yourself and those directed towards you.

Latest version

Babble is currently at v2.1.3, released September 20 2020.  You can download it here.

Changes from v2.1.2

• Changed the “Block NPC” option under the /say channel, so it now also blocks the NPCs that don’t appear to be named
• Fixes to allow the filtering of individual messages in /say (good if you don’t want to block all NPC chat, but just some offending sentences in particular)
• Allow a maximum of 6 chat tabs in Babble Chat Window
• Fixed an issue for new-users were the chat window showed by default

Changes from v2.1.1

• Added new wildcard to pattern matching
• Fix to handle /shout commands
• Fix to sending tell to off-line player

Changes from v2.1:

• Fixed a bug with blocking NPC chat in /say on different servers – it should now also work on other servers than Laurelin
• Fixed a bug where the Babble button sometimes disappeared off the screen

Changes from v2.0:

• Option to change font size in Babble chat window
• Option to show timestamps in Babble chat window
• Option to change opacity of Babble chat window

Changes from v1.1:

• Ability to filter other channels other than emotes
• New chat window that can displayed filtered messages instead of (or as well as) the Standard Channel. Blocked messages can also be captured in the new window
• Babble “tool-bar” to enable settings window to be open, Babble to be enabled/disabled, or new chat window to be toggled.
• Ability to hide the Babble Toolbar (Note if you do hide it, and want it back, use the “/babble status” command to show the command window, or access it via the Plugin Manager)
• Instead of specifying a list of patterns to be blocked, you can specify that only allowable patterns, and everything else is then blocked.
• Ability to filter out NPC chat in the Say channel
• Option to have a “server-wide” settings (so same settings are used for all characters). This can be set via the options on the Plugin Manager
• Update to the Edit Colours to allow selection of a colour by entering an RGB value
• French and German translations updated

Installation

Unzip the zip file and move the “Simbo” folder to your “Documents/The Lord of the Rings Online/Plugins” folder.

Features

• You can set up multiple lists of filtered message patterns, and pick whatever list you want depending on the situation.
• Lists can either specify messages to block, or messages to allow.
• The same list can be assigned to multiple channels.
• You can set up multiple lists of player names, to make exceptions for the blocked/allowed messages.
• You can specify the colour of the “filtered” messages that Babble sends to the Standard channel.
• The latest version of Babble comes with its own chat-style window, which can also receive filtered messages from any of the relevant channels. It can also receive blocked messages.

Usage

Babble can be loaded via the in-game Plugin Manager, or with one of the following command line option

/plugins load babble

The following commands are available:

/babble on – Enable Babble (it is on by default once loaded)
/babble off – Temporarily disable Babble
/babble status – Shows the Babble Status Window
/babble list – List the currently blocked emotes

French Client

/babble activé
/babble désactivé
/babble énumérer
/babble état

German Client

/babble ein
/babble aus
/babble auflisten
/babble status

These options are also available via the Plugin Manager, under the “Options” tab for the Babble plugin.

Feedback

Simbo would love feedback on the plugin, both of what works and what does not. Please leave yer comments below.

For comments on previous versions, please look at:
The first blog post announcing the plugin
The beta page, where test versions of the plugins are released

The plugin is also available on LotroInterface