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Yeah, popular one, he brings on registered bots with the wrong password to block poll bans, it absolutely floods it so it's impossible to poll ban them. because his bots won't vote against him. I have seen those style bots /register then /identify then ban players. ( i know, remove -passdb)

Well, the issue there was that they were exploiting a bug in 2.0.x that counts players incorrectly regarding voting. In our development code, only people that can vote are counted towards the totals. So even removing -passdb won't fix this problem. The problem with having a -passdb was that he was registering local players and then using all of those bots to poll ban people.

That poll still would not have been successful because I think I see 9 players there that are properly authed, so you would have needed 5 players to ban him.

Okay, this is what I was referring to when I said that the poll system should be integrated into the game client. (Note: These are screenshots of Left 4 Dead, which is rated Mature/18+/etc, but I tried to get screenshots without blood and gore. )

You hit Esc to get to the menu where you can choose to start a poll:
left4dead_voting_01.jpg

After that, you can choose "Call a vote", which gives you a submenu (for BZFlag, we could have sub-menus for kick, ban, reset flags, etc):
left4dead_voting_02.jpg

If you choose kick, you can pick who you want to start the vote against:
left4dead_voting_03.jpg

Once a vote is called, it will show on the screen, and will allow you to vote with a single key press:
left4dead_voting_04.jpg
left4dead_voting_05.jpg

And then if the poll succeeds or fails, it will show a status message on screen:
left4dead_voting_06.jpg

Wow! Now that's a voting system! It's simple, organized and perfect for new players without having to teach them to press "n" then type /vote yes w/o a space. I would love to see this implemented.

My god! Anyone who is lame enough to steal the callsigns of good players should rot in hell for all eternity! If someone did that with MY callsign, I'd take personal responsibility to get him forever banned from playing this game EVER AGAIN IN HIS LIFE!

Ratfink wrote:My god! Anyone who is lame enough to steal the callsigns of good players should rot in hell for all eternity! If someone did that with MY callsign, I'd take personal responsibility to get him forever banned from playing this game EVER AGAIN IN HIS LIFE!

Huh? what callsign?

Positive Gravity wrote:

Ratfink wrote:My god! Anyone who is lame enough to steal the callsigns of good players should rot in hell for all eternity! If someone did that with MY callsign, I'd take personal responsibility to get him forever banned from playing this game EVER AGAIN IN HIS LIFE!

Huh? what callsign?

The ones in the screenshot with the minus sign, I assume.

Yes, the ones in the screenshot with the minus sign. Thank you for explaining, blast.

How can you start a vote, to ban someone?

/poll ban <username>
/poll kick <username>

thank you...
i always get kicked

I´d also be happy to have some regulation on how many characters your callsign can have. It would ruin many funny and long callsigns, but it takes lotsa time to write like "q03t98yq09t3y9qit3hioq3ht900t3q+u3t9373" when polling, and easy to write wrong. This would also be solved by an easier poll system, and may not be a very big problem.

You can use name completion by pressing the F2 key (assuming you don't have it mapped to another function). So, you can type "/poll ban q03" and hit F2, and it will complete the name out automatically, and even include quotes if they have spaces in their name. It's not perfect, but it can save some time typing. It also works for commands and variables, if I recall correctly.

blast wrote:You can use name completion by pressing the F2 key (assuming you don't have it mapped to another function). So, you can type "/poll ban q03" and hit F2, and it will complete the name out automatically, and even include quotes if they have spaces in their name. It's not perfect, but it can save some time typing. It also works for commands and variables, if I recall correctly.

Sure, but how many players know that? It would be better to allow abbreviating commands and callsigns.

scorchgeek wrote:

blast wrote:You can use name completion by pressing the F2 key (assuming you don't have it mapped to another function). So, you can type "/poll ban q03" and hit F2, and it will complete the name out automatically, and even include quotes if they have spaces in their name. It's not perfect, but it can save some time typing. It also works for commands and variables, if I recall correctly.

Sure, but how many players know that? It would be better to allow abbreviating commands and callsigns.

I use tab completion. Learned from blast, and now everytime I start a poll ban in under 5 seconds when the guys name is "vfureyhntc6457e8798yrhunvbfkdjgfhUIOHUIG0rrtygh" everyone wonders, so I pass the knowledge along.

scorchgeek wrote:

blast wrote:You can use name completion by pressing the F2 key (assuming you don't have it mapped to another function). So, you can type "/poll ban q03" and hit F2, and it will complete the name out automatically, and even include quotes if they have spaces in their name. It's not perfect, but it can save some time typing. It also works for commands and variables, if I recall correctly.

Sure, but how many players know that? It would be better to allow abbreviating commands and callsigns.

Like I said, polls should be integrated into the game client better.

typing take time, and if your new (or not) you can get shot while your busy typing.

I have a button configured to enter "/vote 1" & another on to enter "vote 0"

what i don't understand in this whole discussion is: it isn't that hard to type /vote yes in the chat ...

sure it's easier then pressing a key... but come on... you can expect at least a tiny bit of intelligence...

Why should we expect that all our users know to run that command? Sure, you can tell people how each time, but it should be easier. And what if someone doesn't read English? How would saying "press n and type /vote yes" help them? If it was a true client feature with an UI, we could have that built into the locale, so the message would be translated for them.

Marzipan wrote:but come on... you can expect at least a tiny bit of intelligence...

Sadly, from my experience, you cannot assume that this is the case.

blast wrote:You can use name completion by pressing the F2 key (assuming you don't have it mapped to another function). So, you can type "/poll ban q03" and hit F2, and it will complete the name out automatically, and even include quotes if they have spaces in their name. It's not perfect, but it can save some time typing. It also works for commands and variables, if I recall correctly.

Whats that called? I think I remapped everything that was f-buttons (not useable on the mac, please do different defaults in 3) and that wasn't one of them.

All of the issues with typing and long names, etc. would be solved by an entirely graphical/menu based polling system like blast is talking about. But there's another issue that I'd like to bring up on this thread, which I don't think I saw. It's happened to me twice that a particular player (Hattori Hanzo, or at least that's what he used to go by) has signed onto several registered accounts at the same time in order to run a ban poll against me. I talked to temp about this once, and asked him whether it would be possible to restrict it to one vote/IP adress, but he pointed out that sometimes multiple people are playing at the same location. So what I'm wondering is whether it's possible to distinguish between multiple sign ons from the same IP and multiple sign ons from the same computer, to at least make it a little harder. Maybe each client could look for other copies running on the same machine. It might be too much trouble/too invasive, but I've seen this abused against me and other players so...

As for the suggestion that there be some sort of beginner server, it hasn't worked in the past so why would it work in the future? I've seen a couple of servers like that, they might still be up. But they're always way down the server list and if for some reason people do end up on them, there's no way to stop better players from joining and killing people when they're trying to learn things. The only thing I can think of would be to make some sort of one player tutorial that'd be built into the game, and teach some techniques in addition to commands and things.

Ephraim wrote:The only thing I can think of would be to make some sort of one player tutorial that'd be built into the game, and teach some techniques in addition to commands and things.

That would be a lot more complicated, and if your trying to make this game more user/non-programmer friendly, then it would be better to take out command-line type stuff anyway.

Command-line is not very user friendly. You could leave the setvar type stuff as cmd-line, but everything that someone without a good knowledge of bzflag should be able to do should be implemented.

Blast's idea and example is by far the best thing to increase user-friendliness that isn't extremely complicated. (though I admit, it would be a large project, maybe one worthy of GSoC '10?)

Wow, those are some pretty scary screenshots from dreamer, I wouldn't want to have my callsign taken.
I think the L4D screenies of the voting system are good, I like the way that works, so
I vote yes for that!
(no pun intended)

-K

blast wrote:You can use name completion by pressing the F2 key (assuming you don't have it mapped to another function). So, you can type "/poll ban q03" and hit F2, and it will complete the name out automatically, and even include quotes if they have spaces in their name. It's not perfect, but it can save some time typing. It also works for commands and variables, if I recall correctly.

Is that remappable? I can't see it in the default config file.