Several years ago when I was a sysop at Intergate and my own server, it was easy to ban players via ISP address. That was back when dial up was still being used and free wi-fi hot spots were not readily available.

Today, there are wi-fi hotspots aplenty. One can take his laptop to just about anywhere in an urban area and pick up a wi-fi signal. This makes banning by IP address impractical.

So what's the solution to banning players who break the rules and will try to circumvent the ban by finding a wi-fi spot with a different IP address?

Apologies if this was discussed previously or in the wrong thread.

Timber

Well, most places in the US do not have a ton of free wifi spots. A few here and there, but
not thousands. So you can just keep banning if you need to.

Personally, I don't ban ppl most of the time. If they break the rules, I adjudicate the game
for the other team. People aren't too keen on spending months in a game, only to have
it given to the other team because they broke a rule. So stuff tends to self-enforce after
that.

There are a lot of open WiFi connections out, and not just the public WiFi hotspots. I can switch IPs at least 3 times with two differnet ISPs while sitting on my deck. Add in the other methods of IP changing and you have a bad situation.

Are your issues with players in a long term type game such as a building game, or during a truce phase, or duping players?

               / Promethius / Enigma / Wolfen /

"A man who has no skills can be taught, a man who has no honor has nothing."

Not running any servers...but back in my day, dupes were a problem..if I ever wanted to run a server again, I just wanted to know how to combat dupes.

Between all the proxies and wifi and VPNs and private servers out there... you really can't.

If someone wants to dupe, they're going to dupe.