Closed Pornographic griefing in the wild

I help run a server and lately I'm getting reports of griefers that are able to place arbitrary images that somehow manage to cross the client/server/client barrier. Some of these images have been goatse style, eye bleach requiring, porn. This is a kind of grief that goes well beyond simply wrecking someone's planet with a modded nuke or spawning an invincible insta-killing giant dragon...also problems we have. Obviously this is a major problem. We have minors that play.

The client-authoritative nature of mod use HAS to be patched and fast. This is absurb.

I'm asking our players to collect what information they can... even screenshots, which I obviously will not be able to post here.

 

Wow....

That's really not cool

 

Yeah, the appalling client-server "architecture" (it's really more like a big pile of broken timber and chunks of bricks that's pretending to be a house) lets griefers, at present, spam hardcore and illegal pornography on any server they can access. Trying to document griefing right now may require illegal actions.


Is this a good enough reason to actually work even a little bit on the server elements yet?

 

Okay, so the goatse image griefers are putting up everywhere is, according to the investigative work of server admins, IN THE GODDAMN GAME ASSETS?!

I kind of feel like you should offer everybody their money back for that bullshit.

 

Yeah, we really need a fix or atleast some notice on this.
This isn't good.

 

Oh my god, yeah, do not screenshot anything illegal that a griefer posts. You cannot have that garbage on your computer, by law.

Oohhh this had better not be true.

 

umm whats illegal about it? yes its a dick move... but there is NOTHING ILLEGAL about it. . unless they are using copyrighted material its in no way illegal... not saying this is ok to do or anything but you need to learn what the term "illegal" means and stop throwing it around.

 

what they are doing most likely isnt even illegal. just not a nice thing to do.

 

We're not just throwing it around, one server member said that someone was posting CP on another server... It's disgusting and, yes, very illegal.

 

Woah, are you saying the images were in the game on part of the devs? No chance man, maybe you should double check the mods you are using if any. This wouldn't be the first time.....remember the server tools made by the fella who hides back doors so he can steal admin rights?

And no they shouldn't give anyone their money back, they gave us minimal multiplayer for testing purposes, as in play with a few friends.
Any large scale servers that allowed public access was to be done at your own risk as their attention is on the single player for now, it's been that way since before the beta even started

I agree it needs to be fixed, but you should be careful when pointing fingers

 

I'd love to see some actual evidence here, rather than simple accusations.

 

Well...no, we paid them for it. If they had just given it to us, it would be different. As it is, we're paying them to test their game for them. As little carelessness as possible would be ideal.

And, I mean, they've given griefers a way to post pornographic and illegal material where anyone can see it, even minors. I think this deserves their attention, instead of the typical "its your fault" response this fanbase gives.

It was, hopefully, just a misunderstanding. The server's thread about it is kind of tangled. But it wouldn't be the first time some dev sipped something awful into a game. I dunno. But I want it fixed.

 

Oh my god, guys. They're aren't giving people ways to post CP and other kinds of things. People are finding ways that weren't originally thought of. Thats the equivalent of my trying to sue Facebook because someone sent me a phising link to get my Steam account. The devs aren't going "Lets see if they'll realize we implemented this feature that took 50 hours to design so people can post porn", it's more of a "Oh, look, someone got around it and the community is freaking out".

Trolls will always exist and it's near impossible to take care of all of them

 

People demand ways for Local modded assets to show in other players' games, then complain that Local modded assets show in other players' games.

 

Tone down the panic please! There is no evidence that goatse or other such junk is in the game assets. You can decompress those and dig through them yourself. The griefers are no doubt hijacking some mechanic to get image information from their machine to yours. They could be hijacking the music file transfer system (that gets abc files to everyone) or who knows what. Obviously if a griefer posts up something that looks like pervy stuff involving children, do not screenshot it! Certainly you don't want that saved to your machine or spread further by any means. I want the devs to be aware of this new form of grief and give investigating it some major priority as this situation has high potential to explode into something quite terrible.

My guess, in all likliness, the devs will know what system is at fault when they realize this exploit exists and it should be a simple fix. For instance, if the music system lets griefers transfer an arbitrary file temporarily into the assets of others, the fix would be to verify proper .abc file format before sending and make sure that when it is recieved, the music asset can only be referenced as music....and not say, as the image displayed for a weapon projectile or piece of furniture.

I'm pretty sure the only common demand in that regard is for mod assets to be transferred from the server to clients as required, letting the server decide what mods should be used... not client to server to client transfers. No server admin ever wants players bringing their own rules to the game. Server should be authoritative, always!

 

Utter rot. Sure might have come from a mod, but is certainly not part of the Vanilla assets. I'd recommend validating things this like this rather than taking it at face value - "Bob said this was true/it said so on the internet, so it must be true" type of attitude.

By no means am I condoning this activity, just the allegations that the Devs added those images/assets.

 

Indeed. if it's in the vanilla assets just tell us the file folder and we can double check the claim, until then i find it extremely hard to believe and a cursory search for myself didn't turn up anything (granted there is a LOT of files). Of course I'm equally surprised if this could be transferred via the game's networking protocols. Has to be hidden content in a mod.

 

I remember playing Counter Strike back in the heyday of Goatse man, people would have it as their spray tag. Or they would have naked ladies and their bits.

This is why so many games today require players to log into a megaserver or some such thing, because doing stuff like this is not rocket science. Hopefully it can be alleviated with further development.

The only short term answer I think is to play with a password on your server to mitigate griefers finding access in the first place. I have not played Starbound online but I could not imagine doing so at all on an open server at this stage.

 

There IS an exploit in starbound somewhere that is allowing this. Unmodded clients are able to witness this. If you want to work with us to get this solved, please let me know. I've got screenshots of this crap in action now.

We already know clients can send .abc information to the server and back down to clients... perhaps that system is being exploited? It IS happening somehow.