Global Ban list compilation

[Boogerhead]

I am quite happy to supply information to a main Administartor who would implement this system but more over I wondered if TW themselves would consider taking part in this venture by providing some means of reporting a banned list via a server update?

Again this would only be a means of reporting a banned player to an outside server where the list could be compiled but would be a huge boon to RO Admins if they wish to move forward with this venture.

I would suggest that perhaps Tripwire might consider creating a forum for contributors to the ban list, for discussion of why someone was banned. If you guys are interested in having me work on the back-end and/or file server support, get me in.

Not to speak for TWI, though, but I wonder if they'd be a bit hesitant to unleash such a server list. That might amount to a tacit endorsement of a third party's judgment without review, e.g., they're helping ban someone from their game -- paid customers -- based on someone else's opinion with which they're not intimately familiar.

If there can be no strong censensus on some of the potential reasons for bans (e.g., some don't think racism is deserving of a permanent ban, and others do), perhaps it might be possible to automate the process to offer several lists, e.g., racism bans but no offensive name bans.

 

[Punchy]

Whilst I agree in principal with this I have some reservations about it, yes we as admins can set a universal set of rules, but they can still be interpreted in different ways, one person joke is another persons insult for example, tk's, think back to when you were a new player, I know i had no end of tk's to my name all accidental, as for trust hmmm, I know Mike and Butch but don't know anyone else or they me.

What if I ban another admins best friend who contributes towards paying for the server they use, what if one of you admins ban one of our contributors, dedicated servers are not cheap to rent would you be willing to lose a valuable contributor,(plug here, we have a spare slot on our dedi server for a RO server, cheap to).

What about evidence, screen shots are useless they can be faked quite easily, is there going to be an appeal process and who will invigilate this. Every thing can be abused and I can see that this will be to, to settle grudges, there are many plus points for a ban list but, just as many negatives as well, this will cause a lot of bad, bad feelings and arguments, as I've said I'm not against it but can see the pitfalls.

Playing devils advocate a bit here I think.

 

[CobraDueCento]

Punchy, on a system, which has such a real huge influence on players privacy, there can't be enough devils advocates!

In fact, I thought a lot about these pitfalls in the last days too, but I didn't get a real good idea, how that could be handled well. The point is, that on such a system, we need to expect the worst case. As you wrote, whats about the administrators best friend... (Even if he is in competition with an other one in a rankinglist... "Hey Cobra, could you please ban 'HeIsTheBetterOne' for this weekend? Then I can overhaul him in the rankinglist"... and his sister is my girlfriend... Even if we have built in tonns of securities, I could do that friday evening, waiting for monday, and excuse me in thousand words for this mistaken ban... it's too late, and his ranking is adulterated... and nobody is able to circumstantiate that it was my aim...)
If we build in so much securities, that it is save against abuse, it will rest a toothless paper tiger - or such a complicated and laborious handling will be requested, that no admin is willing to use it. And each creator of such a global banlist-system is compelled to do his best against abuse!
The other side is, IF it works well and it comes to a reliable system, it would be a great and helpfull system. And to have a chance to become reliable, it has to start somehow and sometime. Maybe we need a supreme authority (Tripwire?), who has the power to add and remove admins to the global banlist-system, which is accepted as a natural authority by the main part of players and admins...

So I'm a little bit at a loss with a global banlist at the moment...

 

[ButchCassidy]

Well I can see the argument Punchy and as I have stated it is a very sensitive subject but there are other global banlists in operation most noteably those for punkbuster.
Although these are for players actually caught cheating something I have not seen in RO at all!!

The suggestion here is for players to be banned for general misbehaviour as cheating does not seem to be a real issue.

Most of us already operate servers with strict rules but if I ban a player (something I avoid doing if at all possible) from my server he simply joins another and can continue to be disruptive on this and other servers.

I personally think that if we do wish to make a point to player who misbehaves in this way then having them placed on a global banlist for say 2 weeks should in most cases make that point that their behaviour is unacceptable.

If a player then finds himself banned again for another rule breach maybe the ban should stay in place for longer?

As to whether this system could be open to abuse then the answer is yes it could be but thats the case with almost all online gaming, all we can do as responsible Admins is try to put a structure in place that will limit the possibilities of someone abusing the system.
For instance if RO admins were required to register themselves and the server they Admin on an official RO admin site etc.
Then by doing so they would sign up to a full set of strict rules that would govern not only the way bans were submitted but also it would only allow those admins to submit bans to the list.
This would point out if excesses were being made by certain admins and give the opportunity to curb such excesses.
Again this type of thing only works if everyone buys into the system but then again if you dont like the system then you dont join?

If as Punchy has suggested a server contribuor is banned from another server then again rules could put in place to deal with this by perhaps allowng that player to play on his own server only until his ban is served out?

The if's and buts are endless but nothing is impossible if it is dealt with in a mature and responsible way.

Generally RO players are usually very mature in attitude and consequently I find the vast majority are a pleasure to go online with.

So I personally would not envisage huge swathes of players being banned?

But RO is steadily becoming more and more popular and whilst it may never achieve Counter Strike status there is nothing wrong with RO Admins considering the option of having a united front to deter the types of idiots that so often spoil a very good gaming experience for so many others.

 

[Mike_Nomad]

Gentlemen,

Since we do not suffer from rampant cheaters/cheating. The idea and concept of "global bans" is relatively moot. I've given this matter a great deal of thought and the fact remains - - the most we deal with is unruly, disruptive behavior.

I believe we can unilaterally share our ban lists for informational purposes only and share ban lists for use with those Admins we deem above reproach on a personal and private basis.

Banning disruptive half-wits and unruly brat kids (of ALL ages) must be on a server by server basis. After all, that's all we are really forced into dealing with. Else, I fear the intro'ed problems of ban list administration will become a bear with escalating distrust of the validity of accusations becoming an insurmountable problem.

 

[ButchCassidy]

Some very good points Mike..and maybe the way to go initially in order to build up some trust amongst us all.

I am quite willing to pass on my ban list to other RO Admins who contact me via these forums.

 

[CobraDueCento]

Well, I wrote now such a system and it seems to work well But when you check it out, please keep in mind, it's still a Beta-Version - so check it first with copies. Also, if you get german pages or messages... it's a Beta! Simply write me an e-mail with an exactly description of errors you found.
It works on the Windows-Version and on the Linux-Version of RedOrchestra.ini or fragments of it.

And now, Gentlemen, check it: http://ROAdmins.Cobra200.net


Regards
CobraDueCento

 

[Divinehammer]

Great Initiative lets see how it plays out.

 

[sfunk1x]

I think this would be much better handled by an automated system communicating with a central database through a mutator for the server.

A manual process could be implemented, but you run into certain pitfalls. particularly trusting admins.

bans could be set by an identifier - 1 for profanity in chat, 2 for profane names, 3 for excessive teamkilling (this could be tracked, giving incremental temporary bans, or individual admin configurable perma bans on each individual server), 4 for tking in spawn (determined by mutator through coordinate system and delta between spawn time and death?), 5 for spawn killing the other team (again, through coordinate range of spawn areas of each map).

I would think an automated system such as this would be relatively solid. Each individual server could be configured to not allow people who have 1, 4, 5 violations, or 3, 5 violations - so on and so forth.

Can mutators dynamically update the redorchestra.ini file without forcing a server reset? This, I think, would be the hurdle to get over.

In terms of database updates, a central SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL database could be running at one domain (which I currently have architected now, as I am creating a web frontend and a C# frontend as well for my own experimental purposes). The updates could be read at specific intervals by each server for an update delta (once an hour, two hours, 15 minutes, whatever). HLStatsX operates in a similar manner, although it is through a TCP stream to a php file which creates a log, which is then parsed and read into the MySQL database.

I think a push for this would be beneficial to the entire gaming community. This has great potential to cross over into HL2, although I am unsure of the usage with BF servers.

 

[_KaszpiR_]

frankly speaking i do not agree to the global ban system
there should be just a system so you can administer bans on RO server in dynamic way, so that we can extend the 50 bans limit on server.

the best would be somekind of mutator or communicaition plugin, platform independent, that would cooperate with a web panel or database.

and logging of players TA/TK and say chat, and admin logins to web panel and admin actions aswell.
i must suppress that RO really suffer because of lack of those fundamental features in successive server administation.

 

[sfunk1x]

frankly speaking i do not agree to the global ban system
there should be just a system so you can administer bans on RO server in dynamic way, so that we can extend the 50 bans limit on server.

the best would be somekind of mutator or communicaition plugin, platform independent, that would cooperate with a web panel or database.

and logging of players TA/TK and say chat, and admin logins to web panel and admin actions aswell.
i must suppress that RO really suffer because of lack of those fundamental features in successive server administation.

I think this is pretty much what I said. The admin features are severely lacking in UT2004, particularly for RO.

A mutator would probably the only server-side option being able to perform this. The centralized database is trivial to setup, and I have a test configuration at the moment with various tables covering most things that need to be tracked.

 

[_KaszpiR_]

or maybe someone has a player join/part parser to sql?
or should i write my own?

i want to tracj user guid->nick

 

[sfunk1x]

Yeah. GUID to Nickname woul dnot be difficult at all, since by design databases don't allow duplicates, assuming there is some hash involved. This, mind you, would be handled on DB server side, not on the game server. The information would simply be handed to the db server from the game server, minimizing impact on the gamers.

This is completely doable guys. The hurdle of manual banning and that type of thing could also be tracked and allowed/not allowed on an individual server basis. It could be that manual bans may never end up being permanent unless it was brought before a group of people (judges?) consisting of well known Server Administrators, and possibly the Tripwire guys themselves.

We shouldn't overcomplicate the consequences if we haven't ran into it yet. We can certainly plan around them and with some thought and sicussion, a general median can be reached.

 

[Dumba [cro]]

Well, when assholes laugh in your face knowing full well no one can do anything to ban them on most servers, gets real old real fast... greetings, 11557333...

 

[Divinehammer]

I think that we should start sharing everyones bans on CobraDueCentos site. And see how that goes. Maybe it would be nice to be able to create an account for each server to post their bans under. Then maybe the website would allow you to peruse through each servers ban list. Also if you had like a menu system where you could just checkmarks whose bans you want to use and the website would create a list based on your checks which you could then just cut and paste into your server. Then you would be able to base your bans on Servers you think do a good job at mitigating the problems. Additionally screenshots and accusations I guess could also be posted at this central location for all to see and servers could decide from this to add a person on their server or not. It is completely assinine that a player will play nice on one server and then like an idiot on a lesser known server.

 

[Dumba [cro]]

A decent starting point, that.

Something needs to be done before the problem gets out of hand