Actually, unless you happened to be there, none of us know exactly what happened. The only person would be the victim mentioned by the OP.
Before this decends into paranoia, this is what I have observed and suspect -
1) The GMs do not actively go around and police the servers, because this is labour intensive and the manpower would be better spent somewhere else. Letting the system scan the logs would be much more efficient. If they really had the manpower to waste and employ live people to stealth around the shards - scripters/dupers would have been caught easily. Penned-in pets would be deleted without needing a page from other players, etc etc
2) They don't actively monitor the logs of what all the players say in game. If they did, most of what they see would be "vendor buy bank guards" "all kill" etc. They might put in a script to filter for certain keywords and raise a flag, but that's if they are as paranoid as CIA/homeland security/the Bush administration and had just cause (ie lives depends on it).
3) If they do the above, what kind of keywords should they flag? And then what next? Have the system auto-ban the offenders? Or waste more manpower to attend to every infraction? If they did this, then you would see more people getting banned. People that do not make the connection between mentioning any sort of URLs in game and the TOS would all be banned. I have mentioned the Stratics URLs to newbies many times, plus guild pages like TOR. So have many people. I also have received replies from GMs to refer to Stratics. (I hate that, at least tell me what to look for or let me know which section or give me a link, but I digress). So, it seems like there's no "automatically_ban_player" subroutine if players mention
www.*, www dot, * dot uberhacksite dot com etc etc.
So, I suspect a scenario like this occurred :
Victim typed the URL in a public location, another player overheard it and paged a GM. Said GM then checked the respective section of the logs, and verified that the player did indeed violate the TOS in a minor way, and imposed a minor penalty to let the player know that they should not do that in future.
As to why they are devoting resource to this instead of fixing bugs? For one, GMs are not Devs. Devs are the ones that will debug the codes. GMs are the response team that will attend to in game issues.
And in the scenario above, someone paged, so the GM will need to attend to this case, otherwise we would have a "I paged a GM on someone that is recommending a cheat site, but no GM came" post.
In conclusion, if you are teaching your young ward to go to a legit site like Stratics for info, you have nothing to worry about, other players could care less. If they paged, GM will tell them that they see no wrong being done.
However, if you spam Stratics' URL at the Luna gate for hours, anyone can page you and reasonably expect the GMs to do something. Even if it's UO's adopted site/forum. If you want to advise your wards against going to certain cheat sites, be responsible and do not mention the URL in public where other unknowing youngsters may overhear you and be tempted to try the site. Use guild or party chat instead.
If you are hosting an event and want to promote your site, send in an official request and get an approval first. This way if you really get paged on, you can show the GM that you have the neccessary approval. Again, even so, please do so responsibly, the approval doesn't mean that you can spam your URL until you border on becoming a nuisance.
Also, everyone's gotten into a frenzy regarding the recent bannings. I can only guess how anxious and infuriated folks are. I can also feel the bitterness dripping from some of the ex-players' posts. I sincerely believe that these posters love the game dearly and just feels betrayed at the moment. But please calm down and discuss the issues in a matured fashion, do not make a molehill into a mountain.
Thank you.
LOL!
