Personally, the idea of making a purgatory world for problem users is appealing to me, but we are a small team and we have a billion other things to do add features for the other 99.99% of our users.

Most of the people we will want to ban are probably going to be bratty young kids who lack the technical sophistication to overcome anything except the most simple banning tech. Although none of us have tried, I imagine hacking the Roblox client would be nightmarishly hard -- and thus is the least likely point of attack.

I guess my assumption was that fewer people know how to change MAC addresses than know how to get their IP cycled. I'm also toying with the idea of doing a "digital fingerprint" of the system that would include computer name, gfx card, amount of RAM, MAC address(es), ect and do a "fuzzy compare" to estimate the odds of new accounts actually being previously banned players. (These data would be gathered by our client-side game exe - maybe we could create a browser cookie for "bad players" that the forum software could look for)

That being said, we just need a quick fix right now, so I will probably just implement the good 'ol IP banning method.


Our game is targetted at children, so a high level of moderation is required - it is not enough to say "Oh well, your forums are public, deal with it." The last thing we want is some angry parent emailing us because their kid got pogromed on one of our forums.

Quote:Original post by PaulCesar
1. Ban them by IP address, but dont exactly ban them. Block their chat, but dont make it obvious to them. In the game, allow them to see what they are writing, but so noone else can see it. Eventualy they will probably get bored and give up, thinking you arnt doing anything to clean up the mess, and people could care less. Ban both user and IP that way, most likely if he doesent see a "your accounts been closed" or "your chats been blocked" sign, then hes not going to even bother changing IP addresses or users.

The core idea here is good - we already do something like it for our chat filters. The thing we want to avoid right now is making a forked "quarentined users" website for our one or two problem residents.

So, in game this would work well - out of game, maybe it doesn't apply so much.

We have more than our share, perhaps, of troublesome users that disrupt the rest, and our game is free, so we've felt fine about getting creative with ban methods ;)

Some of the funnier ones included converting all of their text to pig latin, or, instead of echoing what they've typed, we print a random entry in a pre-entered list of extremely polite phrases (their messages still look normal to them, of course). We also have alternate channels we can send people to where they can only interact with other trouble makers.

More seriously, we've come up with some effective blocks:

* Regex blocking on names and hosts - I can pre-ban anyone with certain patterns in his name.

* IP range and host name (+regex) blocking: easily get-aroundable by experienced asses, but not worth the trouble, and impossible for many of our younger delinquents.

* Password banning: Most people don't think of changing their password even after going down the street to their friend's house to create a new account. We occasionally get "how did you know??" remarks. It's funny. I'm not sure I should say this in public here, but it's been a couple of years already... time for that trick to be up, maybe.

* Spam-blocking: we limit user's chat rate and throttle it depending on the similarity of what they're saying. Four identical remarks in five seconds earns any user a five minute ip/host/password gag (during which they can't talk to anyone).