Ok, some words on the recording. I'll probably copy this to the wiki later.
In a perfect world, every single player would make and post a recording of the game. In that world, I can do some magic and make a video that shows all the cool parts of the games, put music on it, and that sort of thing. This is not a perfect world, however. Some players have problems making recordings (like durka mentioned with his lag bombs), other players are unable to for other reasons, so the purpose of the recording then isn't to accumulate video of the game, even though that's a nice side effect with what we get. And there's no guarantee I'll even find the time to do the magic anyway.
The purpose of the recording is to get a log of all chat in the game that's spoken between the two teams, and preferably all team chat too. We also get all server settings that are sent to clients. A server-side recording would give us all server settings, as well. Why do we need this stuff?
Look at some of the other things I want done, too. I really want a representative from each team, preferably every player in the game, to meet in #afl where aflbot will log the chat. #armagetron isn't good enough, unless I send aflbot over there. I realize there's several loggers running in #armagetron already.
Most games aren't going to have problems. They should run smoothly, more or less, and nobody will have any complaints, and we move on to the next game. But what do we do when there is a problem in a game? When problems develop, it usually winds up looking something like "he said <this>" and "but he did <this>", and we'll have such a mess of everybody's different points of view that there's no way to sort it out based on what people say about the game. So we need some way to see into the game, and the events leading up to the game, and that's what the recording provides.
When it comes to conduct inside the game, actual light cycle maneuvering, the only recordings that will work are recordings made in 0.3.0, because those can be played back in a client that has a hud map and all cycles can be seen. When it comes to what people say, server logs are the best, but if there's a recording from both teams, server logs aren't needed.
So the reason you want to make a recording for your team is to ensure that your team has an honest and complete account of the game that doesn't depend on point of view. In the event that there is a problem, you want to be able to say "Look at the recording I made" so that your team will come out on top. Since we're not expecting problems most of the time, the recordings will mostly be for reference. So you may ask then, why don't we just worry about recording games where we anticipate problems?
Because first and foremost, we can't anticipate when problems will happen that will require a recording. Secondly, and this is a bit subtle, we need to be able to look through previous recordings that include a given team or player or server. A person's past conduct is largely an indicator of their present and future conduct. It is possible that a person might behave badly once and only once, and without an account of their previous behavior, we might be quick to rush to bad judgement. Third, and this is even more subtle, when the problem is with a particular server, we need some way to sanity check the server's settings. If a player complains that a server has increased rubber, we'll see that in the recordings. There are a few settings we won't see in the recordings, but with enough recordings we can indirectly determine an approximation of those settings.
I'm not saying anybody's going to cheat. Quite the contrary, I think there's a good group of players signed up, and cheating is going to be highly unlikely, if at all. But there's a lot that can happen that's not cheating but still makes the game unfun. I think that on balance, wanting one player out of 10 to make a recording and post it for each game is an acceptable minimum load so we can have a little insurance in the event that a problem does happen, and we can avoid having problems blow out of all proportion by having an objective account we can view.
So with all that said, you team captains need to designate a player for each game that will make a recording. It's ok if a player who's playing the game makes the recording, there's no requirement that it be made by a spectator. You may need to make that designation for each individual game based on who shows up, or just do it yourself. It's awfully nice that z-man makes recordings on his server, and I appreciate that he did that for you guys (and I certainly hope you appreciate it too), but you really need to have your own. It's perfectly ok for a game that plays on z-man's server to show three recordings, one from z-man, and then one from each team. It's perfectly ok to wind up with 11 recordings of the game. But as we saw with rico, even having a designated recorder can break down. So a little redundancy can go a long way here.
I'm willing to accept server-side recordings, but I'd like a client-side recording to go with them. You are all about to watch me let two games slide without recordings because there haven't been any reported problems, and we're going to do that knowing full well that if a player from one of those teams has a problem with the next game that depends on something that happened in this game, he's got no leg to stand on. So let's hope that doesn't happen, but get recordings for the rest of the games, ok?
(this is what you registered for when you turned 18, doncha know)
I'm more inclined to think a little bot that could be started from a terminal is more directly workable, but a lot more work to get up. Is the network layer documentation still up to date?