Official forums for BZFlag.org

Players who are disruptive or fraudulent to any of BZFlag's public services including (but not limited to) project and league services, multiple servers, or large groups of individuals may be denied access to the public list servers at any time, and at the sole discretion of the BZFlag list server administrators.

Server owners who run servers that have disruptive or slanderous names or descriptions may be removed from the list and/or have access to other BZFlag public services revoked.

The project itself does not have anything to do with exactly how specific servers are run or administered unless the server affects other servers or large groups of players.

It is important to understand that the services provided are at the project's sole discretion. The data contained in the user database, and list server system, as well as the service of hosting it is not in any way "open source" and no user has any inherent "right" to use any of the public services. We provide those services for the betterment of the community and abuse will not be tolerated.

The project reserves the right to allow or disallow access to any public or project service to any user at any time without notice.

The server Sigonasr2.Servegame.org I believe has broken these rules for participation in the server list. He has imposed special talk restrictions on players solely based on membership within leagues in the community. League members make up a large part of the community and one of the most active areas within the community. By restricting the privileges of league members and encouraging them to leave the leagues, he is effectively trying to break down the BZFlag community and kill off the game as a whole. This plugin greatly affects EVERY league, league server, and public servers hosted by members hosting league servers as well as all the members in the spawn groups for leagues. There are 699 within the GU group, 488 in the ducati group, 364 in Pillbox, and 270 in Openleague, as well a bunch in XLeague (don't have the exact numbers though).

I took 2 screenshots, the 1st was a 10 minute talk test, the second was a test saying "I met my match" which in no way refers to or suggests matching within a league setting.

here are the screenshots:
http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php? ... dab7w66lm2
http://www.mediafire.com/imageview.php? ... dab7w66lm2

It is my opinion that for the good of not only the leagues, but also BZFlag in general that these servers be removed from the server list and all BZFlaggers should boycott sigonasr2.servegames.org

where's the eating popcorn emoticon when ya need it...

The rules at sigonasr2's server affect only the players who voluntarily connect to its maps. I strongly encourage anyone who doesn't like those rules to choose from any of the hundreds of other maps identified by the list server.

If you do choose to put yourself into a situation that you know will make you unhappy, please don't complain to the BZFlag project about the consequences you experience.

That would be fine if it was totally impossible to recreate that plugin on any server, but with a little knowledge of BZFlag method and variable names, that code could be recreated by any server in a matter of a couple hours. If every server chooses to recreate that plugin, then we cant connect to any maps w/ dealing with it.

Furthermore, that plugin tells new players and non-league players that joining leagues is a bad thing, when it's not. It negatively affects the growth of leagues within the community.

Lastly, you know how popular and full BZFlag servers get, there's one or 2 partially populated servers, then the rest are empty. Do you want to join one of the hundreds of EMPTY servers and play alone, or join an already populated server?

This is not just a case of people not liking the rules of a server, its one server personally attacking a large group of the BZFlag community.

Why the heck do you have those server list rules anyways. Based on what you just said, BC, those rules are just a joke put up on the forums to look official, but there are no rules.

A server uses cheats? That's alright, if it makes players unhappy, don't join the cheats server.
A server has an offensive name? That's alright too, don't join if you don't like it.
A server makes a personal attack on a group? That's alright too, just don't join if you don't like it.

Mopar Madness wrote:That would be fine if it was totally impossible to recreate that plugin on any server, but with a little knowledge of BZFlag method and variable names, that code could be recreated by any server in a matter of a couple hours. If every server chooses to recreate that plugin, then we cant connect to any maps w/ dealing with it.

I don't see that happening. Most server owners aren't that mean. (And even I wouldn't write/run that plugin - and I'm the one that wrote and ran the AOLOL plugin that makes everyone talk like a 12 year old AOL IM user)

Mopar Madness wrote:Furthermore, that plugin tells new players and non-league players that joining leagues is a bad thing, when it's not. It negatively affects the growth of leagues within the community.

Lastly, you know how popular and full BZFlag servers get, there's one or 2 partially populated servers, then the rest are empty. Do you want to join one of the hundreds of EMPTY servers and play alone, or join an already populated server?

It is the opinion of the server owner. I don't think a single server is going to kill off the leagues. People will just stop playing on his crappy server. Vote with your feet and his server will fall off the list.

Mopar Madness wrote:This is not just a case of people not liking the rules of a server, its one server personally attacking a large group of the BZFlag community.

Why the heck do you have those server list rules anyways. Based on what you just said, BC, those rules are just a joke put up on the forums to look official, but there are no rules.

A server uses cheats? That's alright, if it makes players unhappy, don't join the cheats server.
A server has an offensive name? That's alright too, don't join if you don't like it.
A server makes a personal attack on a group? That's alright too, just don't join if you don't like it.

While I don't like the rule, since it applies to me as well, I certainly don't think his servers should be banned by the project. Let them fall off the list because people get sick of his crap.

I'll probably just filter out his servers from my list. I proxy my server list through a local script so I can manipulate the list of servers before it hits my client.

I fail to see the beginning of a trend, here. I strongly suspect that any server that automatically bans players for such ordinary things as chatting more than once in a ten minute period will quickly lose any popularity it may have had. I also suspect that most server operators would rather have more players, not less, and so would be unlikely to implement their own set of similar rules.

On the other hand, I could be completely wrong about this. We may discover that there is actually a strong demand for vow-of-silence servers. If so, it may boost the ranks of BZFlag players in a way that the leagues -- with their own sets of exclusive rules -- have not.

It seems to me that it is premature to draw conclusions about the long term effect this will have on the BZFlag community. I understand that quite a few people are offended by sigonasr2's server rules, but the BZFlag project supports his freedom to ban players for GU league match solicitation the same as it supports the freedom of the GU league to ban players for making public accusations of cheating.

I wrote those rules and I don't see his server as disrupting anything on the public services, or any large group ( players on the server doing the disrupting were not included in the meaning of that line because they can leave).

Jest don't play there.

Also, you don't want to play the rules lawyer card, it will backfire on you. Note the nice post at the very top of this section on what to do if you have been banned. Note the part about taking it up in PRIVATE and not posting about it. Techincaly that makes you guys the ones being disruptive.

The policy was not intended to address poorly configured servers, if it was most of them would be removed. Don't play there, if the server is empty then the wonear won't have reason a to run it and the issue will take care of itself.

JeffM, As for your opinion on the disrupting, though I don't like it, I can respect it. But you're wrong about this post being disruptive, I made no complaints about sig's server banning me. My complaint was about one server attempting to sabotage league play and discourage new players from joining leagues, which I feel is disruptive and negatively affects other servers and large groups of people and breaks the list server public use policy.

If you want to attack people and make them look like idiots, how about you read their posts and know what you're talking about before you make yourself look like one instead. That last post you made was not necessary and totally missed the whole point of this topic.

I have read all the posts, but you are correct you were not complaining about the ban, so for that I apologize. There are others who are and have tried to discuss it here, so if we are going to go all rules lawyery then we would have to apply some rules to them (that was who I was thinking of when I wrote that)

With regards to your complaint.

Nothing in his public description does what you are saying he is doing and he is not disrupting the public services or other players with out consent ( they have to join his server to be affected by the issues you specify ).

He does not have server names or descriptions that say anything about leagues. He is not blindly banning a group of individuals for simply belonging to some group or league, he is banning people based on what they SAY. None of his servers say they are associated with any league so I can not see how they affect any league services in any way. He is not reporting matches incorrectly to a league. He is not promoting cheating. He is not using bots to put his server at the top of the list. He is not maliciously using the list server to do anything to any user or prevent them from playing on other systems. I simply do not see any infraction.

He is administering his server based on his rules (that are spelled out in his help files). So nothing you have mentioned in your post is actually being violated.

Having a large ban list does not automatically constitute a "large group of people" with regards to what we are intending there if that was what you were hoping was an infraction. Using bots to put a server at the top of the list and block out other servers, that affects a large group of people. Using bots to spam servers with messages with out consent, that affects a large group of people. Using a DDOS to prevent logins.. that affects the largest group of people. That was the intent for that passage. Do you perhaps have some better wording we can use to reflect that?

So again you are just talking about a server with a less then optimal configuration, not one that is attempting any form of subterfuge using public services. From the other posts I have read Sigonasr's quite aware of the problems with the current configuration and is working to make it have less false positives. It is his choice to use a plug-in to enforce his rules, and he has to to deal with any problems it may generate.

As for banning people in specific groups, a lot of servers actually do that, and that is not against the policy for good reason. Many servers use groups for "jerk control" and even MOFO disallows all users in the COPPA group simply because the language on the server isn't really appropriate for kids under 13.

thank you for the longer more defined answer, I had been wondering why you said "you guys" and not just "you". I was not aware of how frequently servers block other groups.