if ( player.location == "commons" || player.location == "ecommons" ) player.area = antonicaMiddle

doesn't seem like it would be that hard, but I have no clue what the clusterfuck of code running this server looks like.

Someone else in this forum said it perfectly: we have too much population for global chat, and too little population for zone-wide only chat. We need a middle ground. I think filtering global chat by city would work. This is a convenience filter. It's not forcing anything. You could still select all cities and thus have global chat. But for those who want to reduce spam and/or filter out traders that're too far away, it would be helpful!

In the present system, you get messages from everyone on the server. And even if everyone posted their location in auction, it would still be everyone on the server, thus filling up the chat window w/ spam.

I don't think filtering by continent offers enough resolution, as some have suggested. For example, if I live in qeynos and won't run to freeport for sales, antonica is too big of a filtering mechanism for it to be useful to me.

Doing this as a command should not take too long, I wouldn't think. Not a waste. Once the server reaches 1000-1500 max the whole global chat system could be removed, depending on what polls say. Sometimes you have to waste things to transition from one stage to the next. For example, the space shuttle has to jettison huge fuel tanks once in orbit to get around, but without them, the shuttle could not reach orbit. I'm not saying that this filtering system is as important as fuel tanks for the success of the server, only that they would help.

Determining which zones would attach to each city could be determined in a thread and with various polls. It wouldn't have to be done by developer(s). If a coder knows enough about how to make a server and/or player command, and how to work with the chat system, then that's most of the work needed by a coder.