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Dax
25-07-2011, 16:10
http://metabans.com/images/logo_small_beta.png

Timeless, I want you to meet a project I have been working closely with for the past couple of months.

Metabans is the brainchild of Phogue, the man behind the popular RCON tool Procon. Here is his description of it:


We are launching an experiment in a few days called Metabans. Metabans is a mash up of wikipedia (crowd sourcing), twitter and pbbans – but definitely not a replacement for any of them. It works by running a community fed database of players for users to track and comment on. If you ban somebody on Metabans then that person will be banned by all of your followers. It’s a way of propagating bans throughout the admin community for known trouble makers.

It could be good or it could be disastrous; that’s what an experiment is. You can use it to just report your findings on a player (like me at http://metabans.com/player?i=1), view other people’s assessments of players (like Zaeed’s of me at http://metabans.com/assessment?i=5) or follow those you trust to enforce their banlists on your servers (http://metabans.com/phogue). At the moment it runs with support for Bad Company 2 and Medal of Honor in Procon 1.0, but can easily support every game on our end.


http://phogue.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/metabans-300x300.png

It works by an rcon tool reporting what it sees in a server to http://metabans.com. We generally have one of those running, right? This can be any rcon tool that includes support for Metabans over any game. Metabans skims the top of the information it has collected to present the data most commonly reported by various sources. When a player is sighted, Metabans will simply tell the rcon tool to enforce the ban.

Morpheus and I will be writing up a wiki this afternoon which should detail instructions for your favourite rcon tool makers to follow. Adding support for Metabans to an existing rcon tool is easy, but using it will undoubtedly be an uphill battle since you all don’t like new things =P

Information is scarce because we’re running through the final checks before going into a beta. At that time we’ll have the wiki up with (hopefully) tons of information as well as the plugin available for procon 1.0 so you can all begin streaming in BFBC2 and MOH 2010. The site is up, but it’s looking boring for now until we have some data in it to show you =P

What is Metabans?

At its core, metabans is a ban list publishing tool, it allows communities to publish their banlists to the wide world, so that they can be viewed, criticized or ignored. With the large amounts of banlists that get published to the tool, comes some great advantages in player tracking. The more metabans becomes used, the more useful metabans becomes. Metabans itself has no input on anything is written or acted upon about any player, it is made entirely of crowd-sourced data, which can be picked and chosen from at will.

http://metabans.com/player?i=1 - Here is a link to a player page, in this case, Phogue. The right hand column shows comments made about the player, with "upvoted comments" floating to the top of the page so they are seen first (Please note this isnt a particularly constructive page as it was used for a lot of testing so has some spam on it). The left hand side shows the "rating" of players, upvotes and downvotes without comments to give a general feel for the player, does everyone hate him/her, or does everyone love them. At the bottom of the left column is the "Protection" and "Bans" a player has against them. This serves to function as information as to if the player has been banned or protected by other players. In this case, you can see that Phogue has been protected by 9 accounts on metabans, with a graph at the bottom, showing the common reasons for this (the same information is shown on bans).

How does it work

The first core part on how metabans works is the "sighting" of players. At the very least, all streaming servers "sight" players, that is to say, they add them to the database. I promise you, every single one of your soldiers is on that site, and probably every soldier you ever came across on the battlefield is there also. Our player database has been streamed, to give the site a head start on the players tracked in the database.

Once players have been sighted, they can be watched, they can be protected, or they can be banned. A watched player is what it says it is, its watched. Everything that happens to that player on metabans will be shown in the feed of the account watching them. A protected player makes them immune to actions done through metabans, which I will come back to later. A banned player is banned, they will be kicked every time they try to join the servers following that metabans account.

Here is the bit where it gets interesting, any account has the option to "follow" any of the other accounts. By following an account, you basically agree to enforce their banlist, or certain parts of it (you can specify reasons to follow e.g. cheat).

How does it effect Timeless

At the moment, it doesn't, at all. All I am using it for is the sighting of players. But, the potential benifits of this tool are huge, and the amount we use it is entirely up to us.

We can follow some people, enforce their bans.

We could not follow anyone, but publish our bans for others to follow.

We could publish all of our bans, or just ones with certain reasons.

That is what this thread is for, I want a discussion on where we should go from here. I welcome input from everyone for it, or against it. Admins, Advanced members, Co-op members and regular members are all welcomed to add their inputs.

Bert
25-07-2011, 16:18
Ok guys, this tool will be very very useful in the future

You can look at it as a community-led version of PBBans
but with a few more useful tools

With the tool we can see who has been banned by other servers/clans
and more importantly why they have been banned.....

It allows us to track the history of players on other servers and most importantly use the information it provides to investigate players on our servers before they start to cause problems

I strongly suggest you go to http://metabans.com/ and register

from there you can follow the page > http://metabans.com/ike#sightings which list the players on our servers AND marks if they have been banned elsewhere!
Metabans is already used by other clans such as TeamDeFRA.

Remember this is just another tool to help you catch cheats, but once its out of Beta its looking like its going to be a brilliant community resource for all the clans/communities using it.

We have already used it to catch cheats on our servers :)

My vote is to
1. publish our banlist (or cheats)
2. follow trusted clans/communities such as TeamDeFRA
3. enforce any bans made for 'cheat'

my only concern with this is how 'trustworthy' those we choose to follow are going to be with their bans.........

jumbaa2
29-01-2012, 17:21
744074417442

XxXButcher
29-01-2012, 17:26
I don't understand :lol1:

Storm_Seraphin
29-01-2012, 17:33
me neither, like the use of massive amounts of arrows though :lol1:, mind you I can spot atleast two more" Timeless" that wasn't hightlighted :lol1:

Bert
29-01-2012, 20:43
on a slight more 'on topic' note lol (no clue here either)
metabans is back up and working on our servers :)

Raven
29-01-2012, 21:23
Ok guys, this tool will be very very useful in the future

You can look at it as a community-led version of PBBans
but with a few more useful tools

With the tool we can see who has been banned by other servers/clans
and more importantly why they have been banned.....

It allows us to track the history of players on other servers and most importantly use the information it provides to investigate players on our servers before they start to cause problems

I strongly suggest you go to http://metabans.com/ and register

from there you can follow the page > http://metabans.com/ike#sightings which list the players on our servers AND marks if they have been banned elsewhere!
Metabans is already used by other clans such as TeamDeFRA.

Remember this is just another tool to help you catch cheats, but once its out of Beta its looking like its going to be a brilliant community resource for all the clans/communities using it.

We have already used it to catch cheats on our servers :)

My vote is to
1. publish our banlist (or cheats)
2. follow trusted clans/communities such as TeamDeFRA
3. enforce any bans made for 'cheat'

my only concern with this is how 'trustworthy' those we choose to follow are going to be with their bans.........

i would think we should check ourselves before enforcing those bans on our servers

Kharak
30-01-2012, 05:54
Not much to say, its a splendid idea :good1:

radical red
30-01-2012, 06:14
This is great. All you guys do so much behind the scenes, thanks guys! :) If there is anytime where I could be of any use, I would be more than happy to help. :)

And jumbaa2, he cracks me up that guy :rofl:

radical red
30-01-2012, 06:36
Should I register on metabans as well? Will it help if I wanna look up a player? Or is it for admins only?

Ripper
30-01-2012, 09:55
Good question RR m8, was wondering same, if its worth for us to register as well.

Bert
30-01-2012, 11:05
no reason at all you cant join up
for praticality though all you need to do is watch this page here
http://metabans.com/ike#sightings

Chriss-FIN-
30-01-2012, 21:01
i would think we should check ourselves before enforcing those bans on our servers

Yeh, same toughs from here as we dont know what are banning procedures at other communities + can we trust random admins ?
As far as i have seen other communities, some of them are really lacking proper procedures for bans and ban quite randomly in the name of cheat.

Bert
31-01-2012, 10:27
you are absolutly right, we should never follow just anybody.

this is all about 'following' who you trust.
only bans of those you choose to follow are enforced not every ban added to metabans. and they are not actually banned on our servers anyway just prevented from joining, the ban is on the original server.

you can choose for example to follow team-de-france and get every ban they make on their servers OR follow majorMk and only get anyone with 75% or higher on the cheat-o-meter.
there are a lot of options here, so no need to worry.
plus if we find a ban we dont like we just send them back to the original banning clan/community. or just stop following them

Ripper
02-02-2012, 13:05
Started following Youtubehackeralert, he banned quite a few good hackers, so far no doubtful bans, he also chases down ppl selling hacks on youtube.

Bert
02-02-2012, 20:57
spot on ripper, got it in one
+rep
if we all start looking out for good people to follow, we get used to names to look out for on the servers

currently we are not 'following' anybody but we may at some point and its a good idea to know beforehand who will be good to 'follow'

tris4992
02-02-2012, 21:08
Started following Youtubehackeralert, he banned quite a few good hackers, so far no doubtful bans, he also chases down ppl selling hacks on youtube.

Yea, he's also following me ? :o

I had no idea why, to be honest I don't even know why I have a metabans account :s

Bert
02-02-2012, 21:10
tbh i think he follows literally everyone...

Dax
02-02-2012, 21:44
tbh i think he follows literally everyone...

Hes following everyone on a script, including accounts that havnt been validated yet ;)

-GQ-gotya-ha
02-02-2012, 23:05
-GQ- have set up an account. GQAdminteam

We are not following anyone yet either..

#think Dax is right about the script as he followed us within 30 seconds of signing up .lol

XxXButcher
03-02-2012, 09:26
some nice unreasoned banning going on there...
good point, that you can select which banlist you take and which ones are just gobsh1te :good2:

Ripper
03-02-2012, 10:22
Even when following you can state which bans to enforce,
like only over 75% overall headshot etc, there's options for that, so it aint a blind follow. :)


So on options I set mine to this:

. Follow and enforce only the bans from the accounts I follow with one or more of the following phrases in the reason

70% cheat score

70% average headshot