UHG!

[microbus]

Anyone ever try being friendly to him?

[Lucifer]

Anyone ever try being friendly to him?

Yes.

[microbus]

he never causes trouble in the microbuscity server...
He used to, sometimes, but seems okay lately.

[TiTnAsS]

authenticating would fix this problem wouldnt it?

Not alone. Authentication plus a registration process that makes it hard to get new user IDs (a club where the chief decides who gets in, or a paid membership) plus servers than only let in authorized players from these restricted authorities (won't be the default setting for sure) can do it. Every other method (letting the client send a unique machine ID, for example the CPUID) won't work in an OS game.
Just silence him. I don't want to hear no "but then I won't be able to counter the bad things he says about me"; nobody else is listening to them. There are just two possible reactions, either get mad at him or ignore him. And he wants you to get mad.

I ignore him fine. The problem is, i silence him leave and go somewhere else, he chases and comes udner a dif name then starts talking shit and kick spamming me you know.. I tell him just leave me alone he wont. He says "its so fun harassing you tit blah blah blah so blah blah blah and ill never leave you alone cuz blah blah blah and i annoy you blah blah so blah...much"........!!!! If i have him silenced he kick spams and comes under dif names EACH time.,..

I've tryed being friendly. Even tryed a simple "please leave me alone and i wont say a word to you or about your"...he goes "NO TIT ITS TO FUN CUZ YOU GET SCARED" .. then you know me "scared over the net? leave me alone you ....ing loser..."

[Lucifer]

The point isn't to make it impossible for him to do these things. The point is to make it more inconvenient to him than it is to us, and then he'll stop when he realizes he's the butt of the joke now.

Same thing in general security. You can't make a server impenetrable, so instead you want to make it so expensive (in terms of time and effort) that the evil-doer will go crack someone else's server.

(Say what you want about Bush and I'll probably agree, but it's cool that he brought "evil-doer" back into regular non-cliched use)

[Z-Man]

TnA: I suggest you look up "ignore" in a dictionary It has two parts: don't react emotionally to anything he does (that's the part that's good for you), and don't show any reaction whatsoever to what he does (that's the part that will not give him the satisfaction he wants from it). No "please stop", no "you're not annoying", not even a "Yawn!". The "not giving him satisfaction" part will take a long time to kick in, because he'll instinctively knows he's still annoying you even if you don't show it.

I think I'll limit the time of kick votes on one player; after a kick vote on you, no further kick vote will be submittable for a configurable time (defaults to ten minutes). After a kick vote has been rejected, there is really no point in starting the next one immediately afterwards anyway.
But even after that and the better spam protection is in place, the problem won't be solved. There are plenty of other ways to annoy, and to block them all (drawing obscene pictures with your cycle?), we'd have to block everything that's fun, too. I'm only willing to stop the "top ten of easy ways to annoy", and only those that are reasonably easy to fix without side effects.

Lucifer: are you suggesting that, while in chat mode, pressing one of the instant chat keys should simply insert the chat string? That sounds doable.

[Lucifer]

Lucifer: are you suggesting that, while in chat mode, pressing one of the instant chat keys should simply insert the chat string? That sounds doable.

Absolutely.

[TiTnAsS]

Z-man: The ammount of vote spams at once dosnt really matter, i found a way around that. Just let them sit and decay and you wont get as much spam. I've also not said anything at all to him and just ignored and i will continue to. Drawing pictures and stuff won't be a problem, only things i think we have to worry about is harassment vote spam and thats all. Both solvable. Just keep silencing and ignore (if it really works (we need a glare emoticon)) and just dont vote and let them decay solves the problems pretty well...

Luci thatd be a neat idea..

[Z-Man]

Allright. I implemented the measures I talked about anyway, because they're bugfixes:
- there is now a limit of votes submitted by each voter that can be active at the same time. That and the total limit (hardcoded to five up to now) are configurable.
- Vote spam settings are memorized; disconnecting and reconnecting won't clear your spam rate.
- No kick votes against the same player can be issued within a configurable amount of time.
The changes are active on the CVS test server and MIN_VOTERS has been set to 2 so it's easier to test out.

Left to do (as a reminder to myself mostly):
- Lucifers chat suggestion. This is a feature, depending on the complexity of the implementation, it'll have to go to the trunk.
- Making it so that leaving and reconnecting does not protect you against a kick vote in process.
- Make the timeout scale with the total number of voters; the problem with the current setup is that sometimes (when not enough players are online), if everyone ignores a vote, it gets accepted by default.
- Fix the menu flickering between rounds.
- If you're kicked or lose the connection while in the ingame menu, you won't be notified until you leave the menu.
The last two are not really essential and sound complicated and risky, so I'll probably to them in the trunk as well.