In multiplayer video games with decentralized servers, such as Quake (or in this case, Tremulous), there comes a point in the community when a realization dawns that there are far too many people in the game who are there only to cause grief to other players. What motivates such players to act as they do? That is beyond me. You may ask, though: who cares about ‘griefers’? Can’t you just ban them and be done with it? Well, the answer is: yes, you can ban them and be done with it. But the trouble is that with multiple servers, they could just go grief elsewhere. Eventually they would run out of servers, this is true, but in games like Counter Strike there could be thousands of servers. So what is one to do? One possible solution is Global Banning.

The above image demonstrates how global banning should be made, generally. This approach is rather nice because:

• It is rather clean.
• An uploaded ban is in effect immediately — no waiting to fetch a new ban list to merge with.
• Multiple networks could be created and linked together, master servers acting as routers.
• If each server acts as a master server, and each server is able to get lists from multiple servers, this creates a decentralized, p2p network.
• If there is a particularly trusted server with good admins, all other servers can benefit.
• Griefers are kept away longer.

Enjoy!

Note: this is not an original idea of mine.