imposter... wtf do i do...?

[Tank Program]

Lol nice idea tank

[wrtlprnft]

Ooooh how booring...
You might think pinp would respond with something, like an image saying "I'm the real 2020", but he just deleted the ava...

probably he isn't able to do complicated things like creating an animated GIF

Again, Pimp, you suck.

[Sabarai]

Or he doesn't get how we cought him

Or he's an unoriginal loser who doesn't have anything better to do than be an imposter

[spirit]

probably he isn't able to do complicated things like creating an animated GIF

I don´t know how to do that too.... but I can live with it.
So´s life.
Still he sucks.

[wrtlprnft]

Heh. You're not annoying people all the time

Anyays, the time of the stupid space- in- the- end trick is over, at least on the spoon server

Now we'll see how creative he *really* is.

[BelAir]

This guy is really pissing me off. Passwords wouldn't work because all he does is add a " " after the name or change the capitalization of a letter. He's gotten me kicked twice because people think I'm the fake and he's the real, or get rid of us both just in case.

I had some ideas, that the programmers would have to implement. Maybe check, if somebody changes their name to have the same as somebody else's on the server except with a " " or a letter capitalized, then they should be autokicked or autobanned.

And why hasn't he been banned anyway? Whoever the admin is should ban him permanently. There's only so many computers he can have access to, so any computer he uses, ban the IP permanently. I know it can be done.

[wrtlprnft]

First, he has a dynamic IP, so you can't ban him forever, he'll just reconnect and keep on annoying people with his new IP.

The thing with the spaces or different case letters is already fixed, but that person doesn't get kicked (What if two "Player 1" join or the real player enters second?), but just a 2 appended to the nick.

[gnorty]

Is there no possibility of adding something to the game that identifies a player according to his particular install?

I mean to say some kind of automatically generated key tucked away somewhere that can be used to identify people regardless of IP, player name etc.

Granted it is not perfect, and could be deleted and the game reinstalled, etc, but if it were hashed into another file that is important to the game operation which is unlikely to be edited manually (say the keymapping etc) then it would at least be inconvenient for a spoiler to keep up his harassment.

There is not the user base to warrant a "cracker" scene, and in my experience those most able to defeat such protections are generally least likely to abuse the system, so it might be quite an effective work around.

Alternatively, why not ban the entire range of IPs used by malicious players? Granted, there is the possibility of other players being caught up in the ban, but this could be worked around with a passworded account which temporariliy lifts the block on a particular IP. ie, decent player has same ISP as evil player, and is therefore under the blanket ban. decent player logs into server using his password, and his current IP is allowed to play for, say, 2 hours. Of course after this, he would be free to log in again. The ban could be reinstated if a player on that IP loses a kickvote before the natural expiry, changes to a known bad player name etc.

[Tank Program]

There are some issues with using IDs like you suggest that makes it impractical.

[Z-Man]

I was thinking about exactly that just yesterday. The huge ethical problem for us here is privacy. The golden rule there is that any system should not send more information than required for providing the service it advertises. Right now, a unique client ID certainly isn't required for playing the game, therefore, generating and sending one would violate that rule. Sorry, even asses have fundamental rights.
Later, when we have authentication and reliable score tables and ladders, sending a client ID would make sense; it can give those users who don't want to get an account a reasonable protection of their scores. Then, the ID can be argued to be required for our service and that it should be sent.

[2020]

Later, when we have authentication and reliable score tables and ladders, sending a client ID would make sense; it can give those users who don't want to get an account a reasonable protection of their scores. Then, the ID can be argued to be required for our service and that it should be sent.

we are still thinking about individuals here

perhaps a security system may be useful
when we are dealing with teams...
since the most valuable stat
is won games and lost games
and wrt to fortress
that's a team affair...

i think the system is working well
even with a few asses kicking about...
we are pretty fast now when pimp shows up

we may only need some kind of team-entry check password thingy
when orchestrating games in a formal tournament...

[BelAir]

The thing with the spaces or different case letters is already fixed, but that person doesn't get kicked (What if two "Player 1" join or the real player enters second?), but just a 2 appended to the nick.

What I meant was, let's say "Pimp" joins. Two players named "BelAir" and "Ryan" are playing. If Pimp changes his name during the game to "BelAir " or "BelAiR" then he would be autokicked. Or you could wait until he does this twice, say later he changes his name to "Ryan " or "RyAn". Two strikes and he's autokicked. This would be only for changes during the game. That way 2 people walking in with the same name would not be affected, and the two strikes ensures that any good players who unintentionally do this aren't affected the first time. I find that a lot of the time people vote against polls for him because they can't tell who's the real one. If he does figure this out then he'll stop posing as other players and he'll be a lot easier to kick.

[dlh]

That only works for simple cases. For more complex cases it is impossible. The game will support unicode in a future release. Look at this, how can you compare those? You can not code special cases for every character defined by the Unicode standard.

[Z-Man]

Just to clarify, we're not talking about the original Pimp here. With "Original" I mean active some months ago. He had a static IP. Of course, Pimp isn't really unique name and someone making a living out of taking the names of others can be called anything, so if you're happy calling him Pimp, that's all right, but why not capitalize it as pImp(oster)?

Making a distinction between renaming and new players entering isn't going to do much good. Once the pattern is clear, pImp will leave, rename offline, and reenter the server. Upper and lowercase are, and I think this was already said, ignored in the current code when it comes to comparing player names, and renames are blocked while votes are pending.

Lastly, of course, you should give your server admin enough information about pImp so he can be tracked down. "Someone taking other people's names" is easy to find in logfiles. On CVS Test, feel free to abuse the BUG cry notification, for example, say "BUG, pImp is here".

Two other things may become useful features: kick statistics can be collected for subnets, not just individual IPs. So if, say, mostly pImps come form IPs starting with 123.21 and get constantly kicked, then by default, anyone from 123.21 getting vote-kicked will automatically get a longer ban sentence right from the start.
That, and the kick statistics should be made persistent between server sessions, right now, they're forgotten.

[joda.bot]

@z-man: If you have 10 players using an provider and one player from that subnet range likes to get kicked. All other 9 players (majority) would also suffer... I think the IP ranges take "well behaved players" into account somehow, but with unique, distinguishable player names players will kick vote a person pretty fast if they know he's messing it up.

(ok, there are servers without "kick voting" and also if someone joins a game with 10 clients or players which are all allowed to vote he'll probably be able to reject the vote )

Would adding player's join time help to fix the double name problem ?
(e.g. new player = bad, old player = good ? if the imposter arrives first ... well that's a problem which can only be fixed by authentification I guess)