I LOVE the feature of being able to chat to the other team/opponents in duels - we can exchange meta stuff, or just give kudos on insane guesses. Howevever, there's an increasing number of toxic players in these chats. Spamming everything from random insults to "Stop Cheating, Don't Google, Reported for Googling, etc" and of course things that I can't type on here as they'd get insta-blocked lol.

Now I know that some players get lucky when guessing, but others actually put in the time to studying plonkit - and I don't believe that this text chat should be used to harassas the other team/player - especially when a good guess is made. It's not constructive, and really destroys the cool geoguessr vibe. I also don't think violates the TOS/EULA.

Because this toxic player can disrupt gameplay, you don't want to wait until after the entire match to report toxic text chat (like you do reporting googling/scripting). Here's how I'd implement it.

1) Add a UI element in/near the chat box to say "report player".

2) UI box gives 3 options to quickly choose from. ex. Abusive Text Chat, Spamming, Other --> [user fillls in comment]

3) After a player is reported, their text chat is no longer sent past the client. So the player can see their messages being sent, but the other palyers do not receive it. This enforcing a good environment for the rest of that game

Enforcement.

1) After receiving [a certain number] of reports for Abusive Text Chat or Spamming, they should receive an alert that they have been reported for violating Geoguessr community guidelines and text chat has been removed from them until they play [a certain number of games]. After they have played [a certain number of duels], they should receive an alert letting them know that they are now in probation period, chat feature has been re-enabled, but if they are reported again in the next ([a certain number of games] x 2) for violating Geoguessr community guidelines, chat will be removed for ([a certain number of games] x 2).

Variables:

[A certain number of games] - Should be equal to the average amount of games (throwing out outliers) that the player plays in a 7 day period.

[a certain number of reports] My suggestion is >3 in a 7 day period that is validated by models with extremely high certainty.

Notes:

1) The sanction increases by 1 for each offsense of the player. If they pass the probation period, it resets. If they vioate again, it's N+1. Effectively meaning that a player will ban themself from chat and over time, the system should self-regulate itself.

2) Spamming will be easy for an ML algorithm to do a quick Q/A to ensure the reports are valid.

3) There are a bunch of opensource projects to train a model for Abusive Text Chat to validate the reports.

Reward:

1) It'd be great to give players a couple of XP points (+25??) or coins (+5??) for "bounty reward" whenever a player is reported and sanctions are tanken. It wouldn't wreck game mechanics, and it'd be a nice gesture for enforcing a positive community vibe.

Again - love this feature, just would like some enforcement around it.

Thanks!!