I dunno who but this brings be to a suggestion..being able to disable html in pager msgs cause I have been spamed to.

Himura Kenshin wrote:

Where do I go to report repeated spamming on different games and crashing games? I have it all logged, but who do I send it to?

How are they crashing your game?

I don't understand what drives these people. In the future release you should be able to prevent this by simply avoiding such users. You'll be able to host worlds privately (announced only to your friends) and they'll never know about them. If you can't beat 'em, hide from 'em.

I've been running a chat server of my own design for about three years now, and even before that I had a lot of unpleasant firsthand experience dealing with trolls. (These days, I deal with worse; I was calling some of these people cyberterrorists because their attacks include personal harassment, but since Tuesday I think perhaps I should look for a more compromising term.)

Anyway, it's been my observation that the only really decent way to deal with determined troublemakers is to cut them off from other users (usually by banning them) by any means possible. Fortunately BYOND's key system makes banning considerably easier because it's "closed-door"; the requirement of creating an individual key first is quite helpful.

In my chat, the least-used commands are the ones that can still allow a determined troll to do harm. Since it's inception we've had a /keepout command to kick users out of the room but not out of chat--but since trolls can harass others in private message if they so choose, it's always easier to simply kick them outright. Some commands like /gag have been extremely helpful, but inevitably there are twits in a chat who like to try to speak by changing their name constantly. It's important when you deal with these sorts of commands to think of what other channels of communication (even crude communication) are available to a user: In what ways can text of their choosing be seen by you, as the result of any command they may use?

So as a suggestion for those designing admin systems: Your first priority should be to develop commands designed to totally incapacitate a troll's ability to interact in any way with anyone else; and players who choose to ignore others should have the ability to totally cut off interaction from them, unless they're ignoring a GM. After that, it will be helpful to have secondary commands for more minor abusers. Although I haven't seen a lot of the admin code out there, my guess is that most people have tried the secondary command types for dealing with minor troublemakers, or else basic ignore functionality is done in the simplest possible way only to be proven inadequate later.

In closing I'll give you an example from experience: In the chat my community used before I wrote my own, we had no admins, but if we'd had them they would have had little power; kicking a user out was a temporary affair, and they could come back immediately. When I wrote my chat, I included a standard 20-minute ban with kicks unless admins chose to change that time. However, there was an additional problem: Name-based bans would be fruitless, since anyone is free to choose any name they like. So, bans were based on IP address. Later, this too had a flaw, because users of large ISPs like AOL found out they could simply reconnect and come back with a new IP, so I had to implement a "waiting list" for IPs with large pools, lest it become necessary to ban the entire ISP.
The more holes like these a coder considers before writing an admin system, the more robust it will be.

Lummox JR

I'm still in favor of mute systems that don't let the mutee know they've been muted. Then they just conclude that people aren't interested in what they have to say and give up, then most likely leave...

If they don't know they've been muted, they're less likely to try for other ways to communicate...