Pornographic griefing with signs

Or, signs get an author signature, so to speak, so every sign has its creator in the description/ a tooltip. I'd actually like that as a constructive part of the game, too: Oh my, this looks cool! Who did this?

 

this is a better idea than just removing a feature which, by the way, not everyone uses for shock images on servers.

Seriously @Narks , get over yourself. You've just got bad luck.

Does everyone remember the Po (the monster that is a smiling pile of crap)? There was a huge outrage and several hundreds or maybe even a thousand or so demanded that the creature be removed.

Yet, Chuckle Fish did not remove it. Your demand to remove the feature may be heard, but it will not be acted upon.

If I sound a bit sarcastic or maybe even angry, it's because you're trying to take something away from the players. Something that they enjoy. You'll be punishing them over a few deranged players that think what they are doing is funny or clever.

I suggest you come up with a server of players you can trust instead of having an open server. Otherwise, you'll just have to deal with it.

Maybe even turn the server off when the mods and yourself are away or asleep. Don't run it 24/7 and you will not have this problem. Additionally you should tell some of your friends to keep an eye on key parts of the build planet and look for suspicious activity like players that are not doing anything in particular/ just running around doing nothing. I know it's a shitty argument saying "Lol moderate better" But it's really the only way you'll prevent the problem from ever happening.

PS edit: Also maybe worth mentioning that I have nothing against you personally. Sorry if it seems like I do.

 

History disagrees with you. This has been a major problem with a more obscure facet of Starbound in the past.

I think they do care.

 

Thanks. I really do believe that it almost *always* pays off to look for a solution instead of trying to eradicate a problem. You guys are both right: Signs are awesome, creative, fun, they should stay in the game. Signs are a way for griefers to put shock images on servers, which is not alright.
So, let's fix the *usage of signs by griefers*. Let's not alter signs, let's alter the usage.

One other option would be to have sign privileges for players: canbuild, canmine, canplacesign.
Or, server admins could disable the sign store on their server.

There are a lot of ways to fix the problem that won't kill a feature.

 

Hmm, well as this seems to be a problem for more than just you and your friends, I apologize for thinking it was just centralized around you.

However, I still think you shouldn't try to punish the players that love the feature, like myself. I'm open for being security on the server if I must. But I don't want this feature gone.

You also took my comment out of context, I didn't say I don't think Chucklefish doesn't care (which can be heavily implied by your reply). I'm simply saying that there are more people that use the feature properly than those that do not.

 

It's not misinformation. If a player is using a visual asset that isn't in the game's vanilla files, it will not appear on your server. I'm talking about items and weaponry there. For the file (not painting) to appear visually (custom image) on your server, that same file has to exist there. I'm not talking about editing items or weapons using default assets. I didn't say people could not carry modded guns, you're intentionally taking my post out of context to further your argument that a feature of the game should be removed because someone on your server misused it. You need to remember that the game is still lacking in server functionality that the developers intend to add later. The game's online component is severely lacking in attention from the devs. We'll get more tools to stop this sort of thing in the future. You have to accept that if you're going to be on the internet and allow strangers (white list isn't 100% safe) to join you and your kids on your server, that eventually they're going to be subjected to one another. You cannot stop people from being vulgar online before they do it.

You said: "unlike a player carrying a gun that is a massive phallus."

There was, in no way ever, a person on your server using a penis gun. It never happened unless you had that penis gun on your server to begin with because a custom image cannot be sent from a user to a server or to other users in-game. Yeah, people can use paintings to make pretty base vulgar images but I think you guys are overreacting because one kid saw a penis. One would think by the way you and your friends are treating this thread that someone was killed by the supposed painting.

Your friends here are calling for a feature of the game to be removed because you had a user misuse it. The game is family friendly. You can't blame the game or the devs because some idiot on your server painted a penis into the custom signs, he could have done that with the paint gun or dirt blocks. They didn't make the sign and think 'man, I hope someone draws genitalia with this'. It's also not modding to use those signs and anyone can spawn them in with starcheat or go into singleplayer and use commands. They don't need mods or hacks to do it. The developers also didn't 'work so hard' to prevent people from using custom images. The most basic reason for that is because files are, right now, client side and files cannot be sent from a client to other clients or a server, as I said. The game is supposed to make the switch to server-side files eventually but we're not there yet.

If they add (or a wrapper adds) the ability to blacklist items, that's about the only way you'll get what you're asking for. They're not going to remove a means to be creative from the game because a select few would abuse it. You're trying to suppress the creativity of people who use signs for good purposes because one person misused them. That's insanely unreasonable. I'm sorry your server had an incident but you're not the only people dealing with trolls. I have been admin of two starbound servers and I know how it can get. All you can do is try to catch them in the act because of the lack of tools for server moderation right now.

 

Okay, so you don't have /toplayership. You still have /whereis and /warp, which let you do the same thing, with the added bonus of giving you the exact coords of the world in question, potentially letting you recognize it on server logs, or revisit it yourself to see if it's a recurring griefer spot.

You carefully screen people by asking for existing players to vouch for new players, and making admission invite-only. Ask new players if they've played anywhere else, and talk to the admins of those servers - see if they've been banned from other servers for griefing. If someone comes to you with a friend they want to let on the server, they have to vouch for that friend's actions. If that friend then breaks the rules, not only do they get punished, but so does the one who invited them, unless the inviter exhonorates themselves by helping to turn in the griefer. If someone goes around griefing and brags to their friend about it, that friend is more likely to come to you, because they don't want to get banned too. Make peer pressure your friend in enforcing the rules.

Let's be frank here - most griefers are not going to put a lot of effort into causing trouble. Sure, they could make crap on singleplayer and import it in, but that leaves traces too. Do a little detective work - watch for people logging in, going to a specific world, and then logging out after a minimum amount of time there. For a griefing sign to be effective, it has to be on a world that's likely to be travelled. There's far too many worlds in the universe for the griefers to hit them all.

Griefers will also not be well-invested in the universe or their characters. Look for characters whose names are strings of random characters or are something offensive. Someone named Thunderslut C***s***er, running around on a nude female human that's been played for less than 6 hours, is far more likely to be a griefer than Milton Thorvald, a carefully-dressed Apex RPer that's been played for days on end. Look for people who don't build, don't participate in the community (if you have community boards or chatrooms or something), and don't associate with other players. On that matter get to know your players on a non-admin account. Play with them instead of being a distantly-aloof admin figure. Watch your community for drama, and note who has come out on the short end of the stick afterward. If a spike occurs in griefing afterward, you immediately have suspects to investigate.

I used to be a GM for an MMO. These are the strategies I used to bust hackers, cheaters, botters, griefers, and RMTs. They work, use 'em. Sure, Starbound's admin tools are crude. Put in suggestions to get them to fix that, instead of asking them to blanket remove features just because they're pornographically exploitable.

Also, you seem to be bringing up this 'drawables' thing constantly. What are you even going on about, and why do you seem more upset about that than sign griefing at times?

 

You are wrong.

There has, and still is, the ability to construct weapons using multiple images called "drawables". That is how randomly generated items are created.
These drawables can be arbitrary images. Like, say, a 1x1 ash pixel.
There is no limit to how many drawables you can use. You could use 1000 ash pixels to make a photo of a penis.
As randomly generated items are obviously visible to other players in multiplayer, this means that drawables arranged in such a way to appear as any arbitrary image are also visible to other players in multiplayer.

This is extremely common on multiplayer servers, but Chucklefish have stated that this is a security hole and censor any threads asking how to create items out of drawables.

Please stop pretending to possess knowledge you clearly do not possess.

You seem to be of the notion that:
- I run a private server where only people I know on a personal level are allowed to play.
- players do not ever share their worlds.
- griefers use blatantly obvious usernames that announce their intent to grief.
- griefers have big signs on their ship announcing their intent to grief.
- introverts are griefers.

That's absolutely insane.

 

Guys, this is turning into a personal argument about which problem is most severe. The drawables-problem is being worked on, now there is a new problem with pornographic griefing by the means of signs.

Yes, controlling griefers is a good idea. But also: Yes, this might need some looking into from the devs. How can that be stopped while at the same time allowing signs to exist on?

Sorry if I play thread police, I just really hate when threads with important issues go downhill because of a disagreement that has little to do with the actual problem.

 

You're putting words in my mouth, and if you continue to do so, I'm going to let this thread rot. I want to help you find ways to counteract the problem through better enforcement, but if you're so damned insistent on seeing me as an enemy that you're willing to twist what I'm saying instead of actually reading it, there's no point in talking to you further.

I'm not saying you need to know every player on a personal level. I am saying that you should be a part of your own community. It's a lot easier to see problems and problem people from the inside, and having people you trust amongst the playerbase who aren't staff can give you a heads-up when trouble's about to start. Everyone slows down for the police on the freeway. Nobody realizes the unmarked car is a cop until it's too late. Same principle here.

I'm not sure where players sharing their worlds ever came into question. Sure, players can share their worlds - but when someone announces the start of a big project, and then suddenly the proposed project site's full of porn signs, and you noticed that world being loaded up the day before by someone who's not part of the project, it raises some interesting questions, don't you think?

Griefers aren't going to use blatantly obvious names all the time. But if someone's sole purpose on a server is to grief, they're probably not going to put any effort into the character they're griefing with - unless it allows them to grief even harder. I don't know you or what kind of server you run, nor do I frankly care at this point, but if you see someone with a character that's barely capable of interstellar flight making brief visits to all kinds of worlds, especially worlds you know to be hotspots of player activity, that's suspicious. Sure, they could be a clueless newbie - in this case a quick message to them, welcoming them to the server and helping them get situated will probably be appreciated anyway. If they brush you off, especially rudely, or you know from their IP address that they're a standing player with older characters, then quietly watch them with /whereis. You might find something interesting.

I'm not sure where I even mentioned ships. Of course they're not going to have signs on their ships. In fact, they're probably not going to have much of anything on their ships, even ship upgrades. Again, a griefer's typically not going to invest more than the minimum necessary to remain anonymous and get the job done, if their sole intent is to grief. Of course not everyone flying around with no ship upgrades is a griefer (they may have not gotten that far yet, are running a personal challenge for themselves, don't know about ship upgrades due to bein new to the game, or just hate ship upgrades), but talking to them a little will probably reveal the truth of the matter, whatever it is, or at least give you a significant clue.

Introverts are not guaranteed griefers. But it's a fact - this game has a single player mode. Most people, introvert and otherwise, will not play multiplayer unless they want the primary advantage of multiplayer. That is, the existence of other people to interact with. So if someone is keeping to themselves, taking great pains to avoid people, and nobody seems to know who they are, why they're here, or what they intend to do, that's supsicious. Why bother finding a multiplayer server if you're subsequently going to wholesale avoid everyone there? It can be worth it to monitor them a bit, just to make sure there's no ulterior motive for their reclusiveness.

 

Either way it looks to me like a feature suggestion (removing / altering / adding) and should be in Suggestions or General Discussion and not In-Game & Billing Support. (As already mentioned)

 

Isn't better if a player with modded items just have a "stain" with the detail of how they modify his items?

This would allow to hunt porn griffers and modders in vanilla servers at the same time.