The destructive practice is essentially everything combined, from being able to buy in-game gold with real money to the non-stance Blizzard has on boosting communities. It essentially puts a real money price tag on any in-game accolades or achievements, severely diminishing anything you could really achieve in the game. The cherry on top is the constant disruptive spam to serve as a reminder of how bad the game’s infrastructure has become. There are many people like me, concerned about this (just check any of the major content creators like MadSeasonShow or Bellular who have made elaborate videos about this). The least Blizzard could do is engage in conversation with the community about this, and not just brush the issue aside, just like I’ve seen you and some others do in this topic.
Because its a “TRADE” channel. Not “post your cat memes here channel”.
Nobody is against social stuff in a MMO. But it should happen in avenues designed for it.
I don’t want to be rude or anything but I think it’s a good idea to move past the surface level topic of allowing/not allowing cat memes in trade chat. I get it, but the problem with boost spam lies way deeper than that, check my earlier posts. The major difference between someone posting a meme about their cat and major businesses spamming boost advertisements on level 10 alts is that the first one is relatively harmless while the second one is a symptom of a much bigger problem.
You clearly don’t remember the a**l spam before boosters came. I had moved /2 away actually before boosters came.
For me. Whats the difference between
WTS X
WTS X
WTS X
and
Blessedblade of the windseeker
A*** for the children!
Bleesed blade of the windseker
A*** for the children!
At least the boosters are spamming it in a channel designed for trade.
The other issue is that boosting is legitimate if done for in game gold and not real money.
Combined with the wow token, yeah absolutely. Without it, I would have less of a problem seeing it as a service people pay for with gold they’ve earned in-game rather than throwing their wallet at the screen. But without WoW Tokens, boosting communities like NOVA wouldn’t thrive, ever.
Personally I feel that the amount of players who can actually afford enough tokens to be able to buy some of these boosts is ridiculously low. I suspect that the majority of the buyers are gold rich players who were around when the mission table was a gold making machine.
tokens simply moved boosting from the shadows into the light, but the flow of money from the pockets of clients to sellers hasn’t changed.
I’m not against boosting since it doesn’t affect me in any way, but I’d like to see the spam disappear, simply because it’s friggin annoying to find a group and have to block dozens of them before I can actually see anything.
and trade chat is unusable like this
I always find it kind of ironic that people want to use trade to chat, which is not really it’s function.
As for the topic, boosting is not against the rules and is a legitimate trade, their time and skill for your gold. Ancelyn has given two great suggestions, use an addon, but bear in mind that only others using the addon will see trade the way you do. Or just stick it in another tab/leave.
I agree, they are using the correct channel for the service they are offering 
I guess what I disagree with is how in your face it is, so intrusive to the point where I left Trade Chat on my characters when I was playing retail.
I do think another channel would be great though, in the past people used Trade as it was the one that you could access in all the Cities. For a ‘social game’ it seems odd to me that there isn’t really a channel for social interactions.
It used to really annoy me… but I spend so little amount of time in Cities as I’m out playing the game, that I never actually see trade chat.
I think they should just make general be city wide like trade is. You don’t need to kill the function of trade to do it. I think making the trade channel a social channel is just plain wrong.
I see this point too, but in the past I remember I arrived in Shattrath to hand in some quest (going back a long while) and ended up hanging around for 30 minutes as there was a great chat going on in trade, so I loitered to read the responses lol
I honestly live on a server where I have not seen this to be an issue.
But if trade is bothersome one can just leave that channel. I do not see the issue at all.
Now this would work, but only if it was monitored and the Boosters not permitted to invade it. I think what makes a lot of people angry is that they have invaded channels they know they should not be in and Blizzard, you must admit, have been very slow to combat this.
Moonglade is a RP server I think Lindomien, correct me if I’m wrong I understand from others that on RP servers it is not such an issue.
Moonglade is an RP server, correct. I like it a lot here to be honest. It is nice and quiet. Many people tell me to move to Argent Dawn, but that place seems very busy and hectic to me. So I will stick to my lovely server.
The same used to be true for the Barrens… .but now… silence 
For me Barrens chat died when they introduced flying into the original continents. Prior to that there were reasons to be travelling through the Barrens but once flying was introduced, coupled with the Zepp between TB and Org, it died out.
Remember when X-roads used to be Kalimdor’s version of Southshore/Tarren Mill?
You are probably right Osangar. I personally have always been pro flying, I love it, but I can also see why people are against it and claim that it also ruined the socialisation/community feel.
It’s a conundrum isn’t it? I mean if they take away flying my first reaction would be…
…but if they promised me/convinced me it would make the game more social/interactive, then I guess I would be torn.