James,
I don't think that would be workable. The system I developed works *because*
it's only for a small group of servers, and all of the admins know each
other. The users are basically a list of NZ ISPs, and we all trust each
other. Trust is very important in making a blacklist work.
If you tried to get 1,000 servers around the world using it, you would
inevitably end up with some 'bad egg' server admins who go banning people
for stupid reasons of one kind or another, and then the system just becomes
a farce.
It works in NZ because we have almost all of the NZ servers using it, and
because ping times for players to servers in other countries are crap. Hence
it's a big deterrent, to know you could essentially get locked out of the NZ
CS scene.
I think that in a larger country or a country without NZ's geographical
isolation, the system would never be as effective. Hence a global blacklist
is simply not a realistic solution to the problem of cheating.
Cheers
Simon Garner
From: "James Gurney" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> Yep, this is the sort of thing I was thinking of.. It would be trivial to
> output from a php file in the format of the banned.cfg file, and then all
> you'd need to do would be to set up a cron job that does:
>
> wget http://whaterver/banned.php > banned.txt
>
> every 10 minutes or so..
>
> I really think this is the only way to go. Imagine if *every* server did
> this? Would people risk cheating if they knew it meant they'd get banned
> from every server out there? This also lessens the load on individual
admins
> to police their servers. If hundreds of people are out there submitting
ids
> of cheaters, you distribute the load much better.
>
> For this to work though, it would need to be very very widespread. Would
be
> nice if Valve could include a readme about it in the server archives on
the
> next release if we can get something set up?
>
