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Shared Ban List Proposal (Server Admins Please Comment)


aca20031

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Hi all.

One of the things I was considering creating for the Renegade-X server owner communities was a shared, global ban list that can be used to help server owners weed out unwanted players. Sort of like an email spam blacklist. I have written a quick spec that I'd like your opinions on if you're at all interested in the idea, even if that opinion is "sounds dumb".

I write this without having seen Renegade-X itself and with little knowledge of how it works, or how likely it is that we will see cheaters and the like, but this is something I would have loved to have existed back in the Renegade days so I thought I'd gauge server owner's opinions on this. Would you use a system like this?

If so, I'd like to get this out there so as you design your bots and scripts for Renegade-X, you keep this in mind for future integration.

P.S. You may know me as a member of St0rm, and while St0rm will be a contributor community if I decide to go forward with a system like this, this is a proposal I'm making as an individual. I do not intend to tie it to St0rm in any way what-so-ever.

The spec proposal:

https://skydrive.live.com/redir?resid=A657CDC4D0E4706A%217668

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Well there will be a server owner's section. We had one on Renegade Forums as well and shared our bans there. So I am sure there will be a topic there about bans.

This is a more managed solution that allows anyone to see those ban discussions, but only allows trusted server owners to participate in them. So now anyone can use the wisdom :) It's also automated, so bots can do this automatically.

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It is a good idea in principle, but the reality is that some server admins cannot be trusted. You propose a vote to allow that server to have the admin access to the banlogs, but the truth of it all is that many server admins appear to be trustworthy but ultimately are not. This has proven beyond true in Renegade, for instance.

So while it looks good on paper - in practice it just really isn't realistic because of the flaws and ways to abuse it.

As Volcom said, a section for server owners is more useful, because then any specific owner can use his own discretion on the ban decision, as well as the trustworthiness of the admin making the ban (along with evidence).

Many times people were banned with what other servers consider to be inadequate evidence, for instance. It wouldn't be fair to those players to be banned gamewide because of a poor decision, and it wouldn't be fair to any admin to have to constantly overturn any bad decisions either.

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It is a good idea in principle, but the reality is that some server admins cannot be trusted. You propose a vote to allow that server to have the admin access to the banlogs, but the truth of it all is that many server admins appear to be trustworthy but ultimately are not. This has proven beyond true in Renegade, for instance.

So while it looks good on paper - in practice it just really isn't realistic because of the flaws and ways to abuse it.

As Volcom said, a section for server owners is more useful, because then any specific owner can use his own discretion on the ban decision, as well as the trustworthiness of the admin making the ban (along with evidence).

The list functionality of this system allows the same. Admins can choose to ignore any entry from "A Bad Community" if they wish.

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Yes, but the evidence is better found in a post than a list.

True, however another use of this system to strengthen likelihood is that server owners could choose to only enforce a ban if the list contains at least X trusted sources. It's pretty likely you would want to ban a user if 3 communities you trust decided on their own to do the same. This requires more communities to suffer, but its still an automated/managed/quicker solution than owners wading through evidence posts in a closed forum.

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Yeah, but it's really only fair to the person being banned that the evidence be seen by each community before the ban. Some communities have an immediate no-tolerance rule for racism. Others will give 3 warnings for it. It's just hard to make a global set of "level of wrongdoing," especially when the fact that it's even harder to know who to trust. I'd rather see for myself, personally.

It's a good idea, but the system in place for it in Renegade actually already works pretty effectively.

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A global ban might not be the best. If a person cheats or severely exploits the game on several servers, then maybe a global ban. All other transgressions should be punished per server or server network. You could get banned from all servers, but not for the rest. It will give you a chance to reflect and change your behaviour. You should be able to immediately return to another server, as only the most severe transgressions should have a more than that server/server network span.

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A global ban might not be the best. If a person cheats or severely exploits the game on several servers, then maybe a global ban. All other transgressions should be punished per server or server network. You could get banned from all servers, but not for the rest. It will give you a chance to reflect and change your behaviour. You should be able to immediately return to another server, as only the most severe transgressions should have a more than that server/server network span.

It should be totally up to the server staff to decide.

Considering how some admins ban for personal reasons on their servers, (which they totally can, it's their server after all) I doubt it would be a good idea to have global bans.

Plus considering the game is free nothing will stop a person to play under another alias/ip/account/whatever to circumvent the global ban.

That's what people do in tf2 to bypass VAC, since VAC bans on all secure servers.

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A global ban might not be the best. If a person cheats or severely exploits the game on several servers, then maybe a global ban. (....)

It should be totally up to the server staff to decide.

Considering how some admins ban for personal reasons on their servers, (which they totally can, it's their server after all) I doubt it would be a good idea to have global bans.

Plus considering the game is free nothing will stop a person to play under another alias/ip/account/whatever to circumvent the global ban.

That's what people do in tf2 to bypass VAC, since VAC bans on all secure servers.

I agree, but if you get banned for confirmed cheating in two or three communities, you deserve a ban for a month or two. The severity is bad enough for global if done on a few servers if you ask me. Let them make another account earlier in the process to prevent him from fucking up all the servers before being globally banned.

All the rest must be server specific, in that I completely agree. Bad behaviour or small exploits is no global matter.

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FYI I've taken all these points into account with the "severity" field to allow admins to specify during the ban if it's really a global offense, and so server admins can choose to only enforce severity 1 or 2 bans. However as it looks like there is 0 interest from server owners in such a system I will not be implementing it unless something changes. Thanks for the input.

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