Major Best Ever moderation changes

[Jenova]

First of all, I'm going to preface this with sorry if this is in the wrong forum (not sure which is most applicable) but since I figure about 80% of Megaman servers are hosted on Best Ever, I would relay the information here. I know I don't play Megaman and hardly know anything about it, but I believe this is a pretty big change.

This is a copy of the post on Zandronum: https://zandronum.com/forum/viewtopic.p ... 84&p=98509

Here is the contents of the Zandronum post:

Hello everyone!

Because I have been extremely busy with school and other activities, I have decided to impose some changes on our current rules. Here are the new rules:

1. BE will not moderate servers for its users. This will be solely up to the server owners themselves.
2. Because of various DDoS threats, BE will not report the IP addresses of suspected cheaters to the staff. We will however relay the IP addresses if the staff manages to show sufficient proof that the user is cheating. This is to protect the players.

These two rules mean:

1. The banlist has been completely wiped. Banned wads, however, will stay.
2. If you think a player is cheating, please report it to the server owner (join #bestever and type .owner <port>) or report it to #staff. We will not ban any cheaters, as this is up to the master server administration.
3. If you are being harassed, you can voice your discontent to the server owner (once again, join #bestever and type .owner <port>). They are under NO obligation to ban the offender, however. You can however, host a server with the same settings if you think you would do a better job at server moderation.
4. You can be banned for ANY REASON. You can be banned for being from Peru, from Brazil or from Canada. Obviously I would never do this and I don't endorse it, but it is possible.

We understand that this causes problems for a large portion of players. A lot of people appreciated what the admins did, but I have little free time, and the free time that I do have I do not want to waste arguing with others or viewing 6 hour demos for cheaters, looking at logs, banning 600 proxies, etc. This is why we have delegated responsibility to the server owners.

We will be trialing this for the next few weeks and will potentially revert the changes if this causes a huge decrease in server quality. We're hoping that the "free market" will decide which servers are high quality and worth going to.

As always, since this is a forum, please feel free to voice any objections you may have. Obviously I'm not omnipresent and I do make mistakes sometimes. This could be one of those times. Feel free to discuss the rule changes, why you think they are good, why you think they are bad, etc.

Thanks for reading! Hopefully this change doesn't have a direct impact on your enjoyment playing Zandronum!

[King Dumb]

Thank you for reposting this message here and making sure it reaches this playerbase, Jenova; really appreciate it!

[Dimpsy]

This is a very big change, one I find a little sketchy but I don't think this should be reverted under any normal circumstance because I do somewhat believe this will improve quality.
However it should still be possible to report potential banning from ALL servers so if such a player does get banned off a server won't just go into a different server causing other people trouble. But most negotiation with this player should be held within that one server to prevent always having to report to the BE admins.

I do have a couple questions though; will a player stay banned if the server host was to make a new server, and will BE refreshes clear the banlist?
If these are non-issues then I'm 100% for this change!

[Jenova]

If you want bans to persist from server to server, you'll need to add another config file to startup that just contains a bunch of banned IPs (addban 1.2.3.4; addban 2.3.4.5; etc). Of course this means when you ban someone you'll need to reupload your config. We won't touch these bans.

[Emmanuelf06]

So, even if some guys troll a bit, the admins can ban him? Good thing to know. =)
Because some people like to complain with "abuse ban" when they act like childish troll, it's what it bores me the most. :/

[Thunderono]

Heya!  Just figured I'd relay what's going on in the IRC right now.

Jenova's apparently deciding to take down BE.  He's already taken down every server, but he's leaving the wads up for another 1-2 months, and an archive will be provided.  No official mention exists, but people are talking about it in the Zandronum forums.  I'm sad to see BE go, but for now, we're faced with an issue-- the largest MM8BDM server host is gone.

Our current plan (suggested by Jenova himself) is to migrate to [TSPG]-Painkiller.  The hosting service is exactly identical to BE's, with the main difference being server location; TSPG is located in New York, but BE was located in Montreal.  We've got a few wads hosted on TSPG already, but I'd suggest everyone check what we haven't uploaded yet and migrate stuff, and, of course, change up links in your thread if you have any content.  BE's wads are still up, but not for long.

Here's a link to TSPG's site.  Of course, other hosting services (like Grandvoid) exist, but I think this is our best bet.

EDIT/UPDATE: TSPG's having some issues with megagame right now.  We're trying to get it resolved.

[Megaman94]

Heya!  Just figured I'd relay what's going on in the IRC right now.

Jenova's apparently deciding to take down BE.  He's already taken down every server, but he's leaving the wads up for another 1-2 months, and an archive will be provided.  No official mention exists, but people are talking about it in the Zandronum forums.  I'm sad to see BE go, but for now, we're faced with an issue-- the largest MM8BDM server host is gone.

Our current plan (suggested by Jenova himself) is to migrate to [TSPG]-Painkiller.  The hosting service is exactly identical to BE's, with the main difference being server location; TSPG is located in New York, but BE was located in Montreal.  We've got a few wads hosted on TSPG already, but I'd suggest everyone check what we haven't uploaded yet and migrate stuff, and, of course, change up links in your thread if you have any content.  BE's wads are still up, but not for long.

Here's a link to TSPG's site.  Of course, other hosting services (like Grandvoid) exist, but I think this is our best bet.

Rest in peace Best-Ever, you were a good server hosting site.  

[CutmanMike]

Jenova's apparently deciding to take down BE.  He's already taken down every server, but he's leaving the wads up for another 1-2 months, and an archive will be provided.  No official mention exists, but people are talking about it in the Zandronum forums.  I'm sad to see BE go, but for now, we're faced with an issue-- the largest MM8BDM server host is gone.

That's a shame. Sounds like the community hasn't changed much from reading these few posts (linked above), I don't blame him for pulling the plug on a service he was providing for free. Makes me grateful for what we have here.

Edit: Changing to announcement since it's fairly important for people who want to host servers.

[MusashiAA]

This honestly feels like a very shitty deal for us: we've had nothing to do with the Doom community for a while now, and suddenly all the servers for this game are affected because of drama we're not even a part of. I personally don't care about the Doom community at all outside of what issues pop up on Zandronum as an engine for this game; getting all servers for this game taken down because of petty drama on the Doom end of the community is pretty unfair.

I don't even care what the drama is about: this game lost all servers, I see shit flinging on Zandronum forum, why are we affected by this? Fuck them.

Sure, we can migrate to Painkiller, but why should we need to? Let them Doom fools sort out their drama sillyness, we have (or don't want to have) nothing to do with it, and yet we're greatly affected by its repercussions. I'd personally fucking start a monthly crowdfund on this community to pay Jenova the 60 bucks he told me BE costs him to host, just so we can keep our 8BDM servers up (sorry Mike).

[Jenova]

Musashi: I completely agree with you and imo it was a rash decision on my part because of my unpleasant dealings with certain members of the Zandronum community. I've re-enabled only-Megaman hosting for now.

The way I view the megaman community is not as a subcommunity of Zandronum but rather a completely separate beast from them. I understand this change will anger a lot of good genuine non-megaman server hosts, so I'm also considering a sort of whitelist (still up for discussion) for general doom server hosts.

[Megaman94]

Musashi: I completely agree with you and imo it was a rash decision on my part because of my unpleasant dealings with certain members of the Zandronum community. I've re-enabled only-Megaman hosting for now.

The way I view the megaman community is not as a subcommunity of Zandronum but rather a completely separate beast from them. I understand this change will anger a lot of good genuine non-megaman server hosts, so I'm also considering a sort of whitelist (still up for discussion) for general doom server hosts.

Thank you. I am forever in your debt, Jenova *bows*

[MusashiAA]

I can foresee some serious bullshit being thrown at BE, seeing the way people are in that thread Thunderono posted, from a sudden overabundance of cheaters/hackers to attacks on the servers/Jenova's internet out of pettyness that 8BDM gets the special treatment and not the rest of the Doom community, which are admittedly the mayority.

[Bikdark]

Musashi: I completely agree with you and imo it was a rash decision on my part because of my unpleasant dealings with certain members of the Zandronum community. I've re-enabled only-Megaman hosting for now.

The way I view the megaman community is not as a subcommunity of Zandronum but rather a completely separate beast from them. I understand this change will anger a lot of good genuine non-megaman server hosts, so I'm also considering a sort of whitelist (still up for discussion) for general doom server hosts.

Shit dude, that's extremely generous of you. I considered 8bdm players to also be very shitty and non-frugal community in terms of server usage, but I guess I was wrong. Thank you for your services thus far, and thank you for our final days/weeks/months to come. I've spent more hours on BE servers than anywhere else since its utilization in 8bdm, and I greatly appreciate your dedication to such a small community of people who you shouldn't necessarily care about. Finally, we invite you to stop by any popular servers when you're free, as I'm sure you'll be well-respected and enjoyed among the playerbase.

[Emmanuelf06]

Thank you for all Jenova, i liked to play with BE....i'm sad, i will miss it  
I have hosted so much servers and mods with it.  
Too bad, people acted so bad, even with doom servers too....
At least, i hope people will learn lesson about it and wont do boring stuff in the others servers who are not made with BestEver.....Life is fragile, life is short, so, take care!

[Jenova]

Hey just so I'm 100% clear, all of the servers (including non-megaman) are back, so feel free to host whatever. The moderation rule stays, though.