Duplicate Player Names

As some of us have experienced from time to time, players like to steal our nick names and troll as us. If I'm not mistaken, this was one of the reasons how WBN registered nicks came about.

Still, there is a problem. Suppose Sticks (troll) is in the game but *Sticks (WBN registered player) wants to join that very game. Right now, the server will not allow this to happen. It's basically first-come, first-serve.

There are two simple ways of solving this problem as I see it.

.. Have it so that a WBN-registered nick overrides a non-WBN-registered nick. In the above case, Sticks would be booted from the game and *Sticks would be allowed to join. If Sticks tried to join while *Sticks was still in the game, it would give the troll the "player name is in use" error and prevent them from joining.

.. Add a server switch that forces players to use WBN-registered handles. This means all games with the flag enabled would be reported to WBN and all player stats would be recorded. It would be up to bot operators to add some sort of switch to the bot-mapping command in IRC. Perhaps appending -wbn would suffice.

Any other ideas?

maybe the server could add a Suffix to the non WBN Name as soon the *Sticks joins the game.

Like: "_FAKE"
but I also would approve a kick of the non WBN Sticks

I agree with Cola. Just append something to their player name or reset it altogether to something like "unnamed player 1"

I never thought of that route. It seems like it would be a good way to go but again, a few concerns.

• Name length. I guess it would be an easy check to ensure that the player name does not pass the maximum name length when a suffix is added.


• Does the renamed impostor already exist in the game? If so, how do we handle that?[/list:u:fff39b0d82]
  I guess it would be about the same number of functions to call (either kick the player or rename player to X).

Sticks wrote:

players like to steal our nick names and troll as us

In 2003, a poop-flinging chimpanzee registered the nickname "Acro." He has been posting on here ever since. I propose we ban him FOR LIFE.

CF

It would be really super easy to add a winbolo.net only flag to the DS.

Min

Min wrote:

It would be really super easy to add a winbolo.net only flag to the DS.

Min

Famous last words.

Umm, I think I stared at the game joining code long enough when I was doing the RSA stuff to know how easily it could be added. It would take an hour, maybe an hour and a half to code it up.

Min