Would this sort of system be worth programing into a formal website?
A Detective's Monologue
There was a incident on my server yesterday. Well, it wasn't an incident, incidents are when something happens. This was something else, an anomaly, an occurrence? But I digress. I was bored, really bored. I had just finished major work on a major project. Most of the major work was done, I was waiting on copper from the mines and microblocks had fried my nerves like the donuts at the local donut shop. So, I decided to watch that chat, the trades, the directions being given, the help requests filled by other staff. All seemed normal, a few new faces, but normal. Never the less, I had to do my job. So I swiftly entered !players and copied then pasted the names into http://whitelist.mcf.li/ The results trickled in like when a hose is shut off then flipped do the the nozzle pointed to the ground. Fast, but not quiet fast enough.
Normal, normal, normal. Our server ignores minor infractions in the player's past. We are only looking for the major griefers.
Still bored out of my skull I decided to get familiar with the records of these new players, Most admins on other servers leave only one word, so a natural detective like me has very little to work with, but today. Today was different. An admin from another server listed a ban reason and the name of an alt account. I looked in chat briefly, I saw that new kid looking for wood. Most of the trees have been chopped down a long long time ago near spawn. But could this wood be the beginning of a major griefing infection. I had to know. So I looked up the ban history of the alt. 17 bans! I thought to myself that I must act swiftly. I must find all these alts and ban them all before he and his grief team can gain a foot hold. I owe it to this one admin, tons of detail the lead me to one alt to another. Then to the name of the team, then to more alts. I had the trap sprung. All my head-admin had to do was ban all those accounts without notice and the server would be safe from them. Luckily, we were able to take swift active against that griefer and his team.
I was proud after that. I felt that I had done something no automatic tool could do, I connected the dots. But what about the other so-called minor infractions in our player's past. Could one of these people have wiped a whole server in the past. I started the long process of contacting admins of other servers. Some replied, few remembered those banned players.
It was then that this tool came to mind. A tool that allows admins to manually submit "police reports" against major violators. Data on incidents not covered on any other, I wanted to know who got griefed by whom. Anyone associated with this person so I can pre-ban the griefer's friends before they came on my server. I wanted to see the full report and all the details to really understand the past of my player's. I search for many databases, and I found none that suited my tastes. Thus, I decided to make this google form as a proof of concept to see what the community thinks. Would such a database be a value to the community? Would it be worth programing this tool? Would people abuse it or does the highly detailed nature of the reports prevent that?
Hope that people read the report and sees that the report is nonsense/abusive. This isn't a plugin, this forces the server owner to deeply consider each ban. Banning should be a big deal.
As i have seen on a few servers recently, my own included, griefing client communities (nodus mainly) have been sharing IPs to server to flood and grief, with a massive amount of players joining, its impossible to take the time to ban each one of them individualy when you have 20+ of them running around griefing.
Implementation of a alias'ed ban system on the otherhand would be quite good, to generalise what the person did in a few words, in a way that everyone would understand.
I think either I misunderstood you or you misunderstood me. Let me tell you what came to mind when I envisioned this. How I would want server owners to respond to this on their own servers is to to ban happy. To ban as many people as they pleased. After the dust settles, it is then that the system is implemented. You would file a report listing any information you know. Team members, their website/forums/youtube if they where dumb enough to spam it. This would allow other admins, when they ran a background check, to see this detail and understand the severity.
The banning and the report filing are two seperate processes basically. With a ban seen as insignificant, with very low value where as a ban backed a detailed report is of concern. This is an action taken after the attack is over the help the community create a history of all players, whether good or bad.
On my server, we look up the history of every new player and really understand them. I'm designing a system to fit how I would moderate a server.
GTB3NW on reddit posted a few considerations for me to think about. I think these are critical questions which should be addressed in the design stage.
"Considerations-
-System uptime - It will get DDoS'ed and it will cost lots of money, an alternative could be a P2P network."
-Maybe each server could act as a "police department" which stores the police reports. Other admins request the report if they need more information then a general summary. Maybe I could just host all th data video good docs but have a website that is simply a nice looking UI. If my website goes down, the google document still works.
"Could the system be abused by fake servers?"
-Instead of relying on the honesty of the people who write reports, I'm relying on the expectation that server admins will review the full detailed history of people they are considering the ban from their server just for their history. That they would do the same people they want to promote to staff levels. It would be easy to see if a fake server wrote a report. A) Fake reports would be of low quality B)Maybe we could develop a plguin to verify the manually filed detailed reports. My system just stores reports, it is up to the admin to do the detective work. That being said, the above idea puts a huge time burden on admins. However, having a good UI design could help make tons of reports into an easy to understand rapsheet. Maybe we can embed a server ranking site's server banner within the report.
"Could players with proxies avoid detection (Yes. What will the system do to stop this? Proxy detection?)"
-I don't have enough experience to come up this an idea to evade proxies, but I think this will be less a problem on this system. The griefers would never know the admins where using this tool, because it is a manually tool. Thus, they shouldn't enable evading system. But that is what a logical person would do, and griefers aren't logical people. I would have to look a case studies to really develop a strong counter-proxy system.
I think that this is a great idea. I remember aruguing with that guy who was on our server, he said he had 59 accounts that he could still use to come back. this would be a great idea to get rid of griefers, but you will always get the problem of griefers because when someone decides to start griefing they have a clean record, therefor his first "ban" would be on the server he griefed. its not totally grief proof but it is still a good idea to get rid of some of the professionals.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Nothing is true, everything is permitted
Add rep if i helped you in any way
Ban Submit Form https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHhHYmQ1bE42djJYVmtnVTFybXUzakE6MQ#gid=0
Database: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ah-SlxWnSNugdHhHYmQ1bE42djJYVmtnVTFybXUzakE
Would this sort of system be worth programing into a formal website?
A Detective's Monologue
There was a incident on my server yesterday. Well, it wasn't an incident, incidents are when something happens. This was something else, an anomaly, an occurrence? But I digress. I was bored, really bored. I had just finished major work on a major project. Most of the major work was done, I was waiting on copper from the mines and microblocks had fried my nerves like the donuts at the local donut shop. So, I decided to watch that chat, the trades, the directions being given, the help requests filled by other staff. All seemed normal, a few new faces, but normal. Never the less, I had to do my job. So I swiftly entered !players and copied then pasted the names into http://whitelist.mcf.li/ The results trickled in like when a hose is shut off then flipped do the the nozzle pointed to the ground. Fast, but not quiet fast enough.
Normal, normal, normal. Our server ignores minor infractions in the player's past. We are only looking for the major griefers.
Still bored out of my skull I decided to get familiar with the records of these new players, Most admins on other servers leave only one word, so a natural detective like me has very little to work with, but today. Today was different. An admin from another server listed a ban reason and the name of an alt account. I looked in chat briefly, I saw that new kid looking for wood. Most of the trees have been chopped down a long long time ago near spawn. But could this wood be the beginning of a major griefing infection. I had to know. So I looked up the ban history of the alt. 17 bans! I thought to myself that I must act swiftly. I must find all these alts and ban them all before he and his grief team can gain a foot hold. I owe it to this one admin, tons of detail the lead me to one alt to another. Then to the name of the team, then to more alts. I had the trap sprung. All my head-admin had to do was ban all those accounts without notice and the server would be safe from them. Luckily, we were able to take swift active against that griefer and his team.
I was proud after that. I felt that I had done something no automatic tool could do, I connected the dots. But what about the other so-called minor infractions in our player's past. Could one of these people have wiped a whole server in the past. I started the long process of contacting admins of other servers. Some replied, few remembered those banned players.
It was then that this tool came to mind. A tool that allows admins to manually submit "police reports" against major violators. Data on incidents not covered on any other, I wanted to know who got griefed by whom. Anyone associated with this person so I can pre-ban the griefer's friends before they came on my server. I wanted to see the full report and all the details to really understand the past of my player's. I search for many databases, and I found none that suited my tastes. Thus, I decided to make this google form as a proof of concept to see what the community thinks. Would such a database be a value to the community? Would it be worth programing this tool? Would people abuse it or does the highly detailed nature of the reports prevent that?
I think either I misunderstood you or you misunderstood me. Let me tell you what came to mind when I envisioned this. How I would want server owners to respond to this on their own servers is to to ban happy. To ban as many people as they pleased. After the dust settles, it is then that the system is implemented. You would file a report listing any information you know. Team members, their website/forums/youtube if they where dumb enough to spam it. This would allow other admins, when they ran a background check, to see this detail and understand the severity.
The banning and the report filing are two seperate processes basically. With a ban seen as insignificant, with very low value where as a ban backed a detailed report is of concern. This is an action taken after the attack is over the help the community create a history of all players, whether good or bad.
On my server, we look up the history of every new player and really understand them. I'm designing a system to fit how I would moderate a server.
"Considerations-
-System uptime - It will get DDoS'ed and it will cost lots of money, an alternative could be a P2P network."
-Maybe each server could act as a "police department" which stores the police reports. Other admins request the report if they need more information then a general summary. Maybe I could just host all th data video good docs but have a website that is simply a nice looking UI. If my website goes down, the google document still works.
"Could the system be abused by fake servers?"
-Instead of relying on the honesty of the people who write reports, I'm relying on the expectation that server admins will review the full detailed history of people they are considering the ban from their server just for their history. That they would do the same people they want to promote to staff levels. It would be easy to see if a fake server wrote a report. A) Fake reports would be of low quality B)Maybe we could develop a plguin to verify the manually filed detailed reports. My system just stores reports, it is up to the admin to do the detective work. That being said, the above idea puts a huge time burden on admins. However, having a good UI design could help make tons of reports into an easy to understand rapsheet. Maybe we can embed a server ranking site's server banner within the report.
"Could players with proxies avoid detection (Yes. What will the system do to stop this? Proxy detection?)"
-I don't have enough experience to come up this an idea to evade proxies, but I think this will be less a problem on this system. The griefers would never know the admins where using this tool, because it is a manually tool. Thus, they shouldn't enable evading system. But that is what a logical person would do, and griefers aren't logical people. I would have to look a case studies to really develop a strong counter-proxy system.
Add rep if i helped you in any way