Some serious questions from a MC server owner

KzoneDD
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Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by KzoneDD » Post

Hi all,

First off: I sincerely appologise, I am certain most of these questions are addressed elsewhere, but I looked around the forums for two days and I simply am not confident I have full, brief, yes/no/brief explanation answers.

Some background:
I used to admin on Odyssianrealms, then co-own Revenge Cove. At the moment RC is being rebuilt as Feed the Beast (Direwolf) server and we expect to be fully live soon. I am an Open Source advocate and run various Linuxes on private machines although work keeps me tied to an OS that will run Adobe software. (I am partner in a small business that builds accessible websites. Not something you get rich from, but I like it.) As such I kept an eye on various open source games. Actually, MS buying Mojang does not have me that worried, but it does mean there's now sufficient impetus to find alternatives to MC for many, so I am considering starting a Minetest server in parallel with RC. My beef with MC is more along the lines of it not being very well built. To give an example; we had a 16 y/o programmer pretty much 'unthrothle' MC for our server and upped performance significantly. That should tell you something.

So, without more TL;DR-ing...

-I see Minetest was built in C++ and LUA. Good, Java simply does not offer the power needed. BUT, in real terms, how does the game perform? How would it benchmark against a MC/Bukkit combo? In terms of server load and player experience? (We have staff with fairly decent, if older, hardware who can barely get 20 FPS on our server, and we took great care to unburden the thing as much we could.)

-Mods ... I'm not clear on those. In toddler-simple-language: if we decide to run a server that vwas modded, how would players interact with the server? If they connect with a vanilla install, will they be prompted? Will (which would be ideal and a major selling point over MC) they get to load the mods transparently? Put yourself in the shoes of a Windows-using casual gamer; is this painless?
If not, is there way to offer one-stop download and install? (Again: for the worst users, so OSX/Windows... Linux gamers are used to pain... ;) )

-Grief protection: I see a rollback option, but on a busy server rolling back may be as bad as the grief damage; you roll back legit builds, too, after all. How are the other protections, and have they stood the test against comitted 11-year-old shits with parents too concerned with basing Obama on FB too monitor their larvae? (Yeah, drawing on a real world case here.)

-Has this game performed consistently on a large (1000+ players) server for anyone so far?

-How would you rate the difficulty for porting existing MC mods to MT? Is this an avenue to explore at all?

-I would most likely start off light, say an i3 with 16 Gb RAM and a 50 Mbps up/down pipe. Simply, because that's what I can build from parts I have within reach. How would the game like that as a home? Would it try to escape?

Thank you in advance for any insights!!

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by Amaz » Post

KzoneDD wrote:-Mods ... I'm not clear on those. In toddler-simple-language: if we decide to run a server that vwas modded, how would players interact with the server? If they connect with a vanilla install, will they be prompted? Will (which would be ideal and a major selling point over MC) they get to load the mods transparently? Put yourself in the shoes of a Windows-using casual gamer; is this painless?
If not, is there way to offer one-stop download and install? (Again: for the worst users, so OSX/Windows... Linux gamers are used to pain... ;) )

-Grief protection: I see a rollback option, but on a busy server rolling back may be as bad as the grief damage; you roll back legit builds, too, after all. How are the other protections, and have they stood the test against comitted 11-year-old shits with parents too concerned with basing Obama on FB too monitor their larvae? (Yeah, drawing on a real world case here.)
Mods, install the mods you want, run your server, and then players using vanilla Minetest can connect. All mod data is sent from the server to the client, so no need to worry on that point!

Grief protection, you really need to install a mod which adds protection, this one: viewtopic.php?id=7239 with this gui: viewtopic.php?f=11&t=8175 is the best and easiest to use, imo.

These are the only two questions I really know the answer to, sorry I can't help with the others!

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by Minetestforfun » Post

-I see Minetest was built in C++ and LUA. Good, Java simply does not offer the power needed. BUT, in real terms, how does the game perform? How would it benchmark against a MC/Bukkit combo? In terms of server load and player experience? (We have staff with fairly decent, if older, hardware who can barely get 20 FPS on our server, and we took great care to unburden the thing as much we could.)
Client side :
A game with java is a shame... But Minetest doesn't use all the resources of your computer (juste one thread for example) and it's an handicap...
You can easily reach over 30FPS with olds computers if you have a processor with a single core at 2~2.2Ghz (or over)

Server side :
The C++ is an advantage, it takes less ressources than a Minec***t server
BUT, if you add many mods because you want a game like Minecraft "default game", i think the performances are less than a Minec***t server because this is lua mods and they aren't in the game_base...
- Has this game performed consistently on a large (1000+ players) server for anyone so far?
I don't know if it's possible, but i can say "a server with 100 to 200 players is possible for the moment"
- How would you rate the difficulty for porting existing MC mods to MT? Is this an avenue to explore at all?
im not a programmer but i think it's difficult porting Java mods => Lua mods (additional you need to know Java and Lua...)
- I would most likely start off light, say an i3 with 16 Gb RAM and a 50 Mbps up/down pipe. Simply, because that's what I can build from parts I have within reach. How would the game like that as a home? Would it try to escape?
It's a good configuration for beginning a Minetest Server :)

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by onpon4 » Post

On the topic of performance: the client adjusts how much stuff is rendered to try to achieve a target frame rate which is 30 by default, I believe, so there can be an illusion of the game having lower performance than it really does on fast computers. My old laptop from 2007, which has an Intel Celeron processor and Intel GMA, is able to run Minetest at just less than 30 FPS as long as you don't increase the window size, so I guess that is about the low end of hardware for Minetest. Faster machines (like my current laptop) will typically render more stuff rather than having a faster frame rate, unless you adjust the target frame rate.

To clarify the topic of mods, mods in Minetest are entirely server-side; there is no such thing as a client-side mod, and all of the mods' code is executed on the server.

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by twoelk » Post

KzoneDD wrote: Put yourself in the shoes of a Windows-using casual gamer; is this painless?
absolutely!

As said before,

the player downloads the client and connects to a server, that's all he needs to do.

All media such as mods, textures and sounds is downloaded from the server. If you change something on the server the player clients will get the new media automaticly. All media is stored in a local cache by each client. This is a great advantage but also sometimes irritating as the first contact to a mod heavy server includes downloading several megabytes of media data. The client compares what it has stored in the local hashed cache so it only downloads what is missing. In the past, this led to the behaviour on some servers, that a client might have to connect several times before the player could enter the game becaus the connection would timeout before all media was downloaded. A sollution for this was curl support.

The player can not run any locally installed mods while playing on a server. The server admin has full controll over all mods running in the server game. Player skins are supplied and managed by the server only. The player has to point an admin to a skin he wants to have availiable on a server.

The player can for example use different texture packs though, that are only visible for him in his local client.

KzoneDD wrote: -How would you rate the difficulty for porting existing MC mods to MT? Is this an avenue to explore at all?
direct porting the code may be difficult and not worth the trouble
but
recreating the looks, feel and functions of a mod from scratch should be fairly easy, depending on coding skills of course.

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by fillforget » Post

Mmmh the Microsoft deal with Mojang is going to change lots of things for minecraft players and minecraft server's owners.

About the amount of players for a minetest server, the minetest servers page http://servers.minetest.net/ show the max player value for each public server registered here. Max values are mostly around 50-75. Lots of servers of hosted on personal home machines, rarely on companies servers. There's no economical models for minetest actually ie no commercial offers for minetest server's hosting. Minetest server's owners are mostly enthusiast guys -and girls- who make servers with their own machines, time(s) and money. Around each server community are approx 100-200 usual players not all online at the same time but daily or often online, 100-200 anothers more irregular and tons of one-connect player who never come back again.

As an example on the user side, actually when admins make some change on their server and immediatly reload server, all users are disconnected and must reconnect to keep on playing. Not a problem on a small 50 players community. On a future huge server with 500-1000 online players, it will be a bit tricky...

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by Topywo » Post

KzoneDD wrote: -Grief protection: I see a rollback option, but on a busy server rolling back may be as bad as the grief damage; you roll back legit builds, too, after all.
I never used the rollback command, but iirc only the actions of the griefer will be undone. This might cause temporarily lag on the server though.

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by hoodedice » Post

Okay.

Firstly, welcome to Minetest! We hope you enjoy your time here, and do stick around =)
KzoneDD wrote: First off: I sincerely appologise, I am certain most of these questions are addressed elsewhere, but I looked around the forums for two days and I simply am not confident I have full, brief, yes/no/brief explanation answers.
That is okay. The forum search function at best, sucks. You can use google or duckduckgo to search this forum by appending " site:forum.minetest.net" to your query (remove quotes).
KzoneDD wrote: Some background:
I used to admin on Odyssianrealms, then co-own Revenge Cove. At the moment RC is being rebuilt as Feed the Beast (Direwolf) server and we expect to be fully live soon. I am an Open Source advocate and run various Linuxes on private machines although work keeps me tied to an OS that will run Adobe software. (I am partner in a small business that builds accessible websites. Not something you get rich from, but I like it.) As such I kept an eye on various open source games. Actually, MS buying Mojang does not have me that worried, but it does mean there's now sufficient impetus to find alternatives to MC for many, so I am considering starting a Minetest server in parallel with RC. My beef with MC is more along the lines of it not being very well built. To give an example; we had a 16 y/o programmer pretty much 'unthrothle' MC for our server and upped performance significantly. That should tell you something.
Nice to hear that! Though, we too have a few 15-18 year old members who have significant in depth understanding of Minetest =)
KzoneDD wrote: -I see Minetest was built in C++ and LUA. Good, Java simply does not offer the power needed. BUT, in real terms, how does the game perform? How would it benchmark against a MC/Bukkit combo? In terms of server load and player experience? (We have staff with fairly decent, if older, hardware who can barely get 20 FPS on our server, and we took great care to unburden the thing as much we could.)
I have not played Minecraft with a bukkit, let alone a newer version of Minecraft. Last I played was during the betas. I have, however, been playing Minetest since 0.4.3, and I can tell you the following:

> Over the last two years, we have seen a lot of significant performance increase, latency/lag decrease, many bugfixes, and new radical graphics improvements.
> Minetest is a work in progress, so please don't expect it to perform as amazingly as Minecraft. With that said, it does run better than Minecraft on certain hardware; which will be explained later on in this post.
KzoneDD wrote: -Mods ... I'm not clear on those. In toddler-simple-language: if we decide to run a server that vwas modded, how would players interact with the server? If they connect with a vanilla install, will they be prompted? Will (which would be ideal and a major selling point over MC) they get to load the mods transparently? Put yourself in the shoes of a Windows-using casual gamer; is this painless?
If not, is there way to offer one-stop download and install? (Again: for the worst users, so OSX/Windows... Linux gamers are used to pain... ;) )
Installing mods locally is a two step process.
> Step 1 - Download.
> Step 2 - Extract to /mods/
> Step 3 - ???
> Step 4 - Profits.

However, players who connect to your server should not need to do this. As other members have stated, mods are automatically downloaded and cached during the initial connect phase. This takes as much time as required to download them off your server.
KzoneDD wrote: -Grief protection: I see a rollback option, but on a busy server rolling back may be as bad as the grief damage; you roll back legit builds, too, after all. How are the other protections, and have they stood the test against comitted 11-year-old shits with parents too concerned with basing Obama on FB too monitor their larvae? (Yeah, drawing on a real world case here.)
See Amaz's post. Yes, there is currently no known way (apart from custom built clients [citation needed], which are impossible for "11-year-old-shits with parents too concerned with bashing Obama on FB").
KzoneDD wrote: -Has this game performed consistently on a large (1000+ players) server for anyone so far?
No. The most I've seen is about 10-20 on Xanadu, and on some of VanessaE's servers.
-How would you rate the difficulty for porting existing MC mods to MT? Is this an avenue to explore at all?
Fairly easy, depending on which mod it is, and the porter's previous experience with programming.
-I would most likely start off light, say an i3 with 16 Gb RAM and a 50 Mbps up/down pipe. Simply, because that's what I can build from parts I have within reach. How would the game like that as a home? Would it try to escape?
The most important thing for a Minetest server is plenty of RAM. 4 GB is a minimum. I've successfully handled a server with about 2.5 GB filling out on my Xubuntu installation. Your net speed is pretty great too.

And now, for some more in-depth analysis. Some of these things might have changed over time, and if I'm wrong, sfan5 or Jordach would probably correct me here =P

Hardware: Yes, Minetest is under a process of painful rewriting, and significant optimization. The biggest deal with Minetest is yes, its poor utilization of dedicated GPUs. If you have a intel i3 with like, a R9 290x_2, it will probably not perform as well as an i7 or even an AMD A10. Why? Because the GPU is massively under-utilized. Most of the processing is done on the CPU itself. There was a long post by Celeron55, the guy who started this Minetest thing, explaining why Minetest performs poorly. If I recall correctly, the main kinks were:

1. The texture atlas, which feeds all textures into a single atlas, was buggy, and so removed from the engine. If it is brought back correctly, it will increase performance by 9001.
2. Models under the ground are being drawn. Even if they cannot be seen.
3. Something something CPU-GPU bottling something.

Network: Half the reason why Minetest is a little slow is because mods are server-side (they run on the server). Client side would probably speed it up, but there are security issues with that.

Server Management: There are three things you must look out for while managing a server. One is hackers, the second is <15 year old kids, and the third is data corruption.

1. Hackers - No way to by-pass them, for now.
2. Data Corruption - Yes, it is still a thing. Regular backups are the only way to avoid it.
3. Kids - The biggest problem, currently. They will hang onto your server and lag out your other, active players. Sometimes, they will play the game all day long. This problem was magnified after BuildCraft, WorldCraft, etc, illegal, buggy, closed sourced builds of minetest were released onto the Google Play Store and Apple iTunes.Apart from the fact that the mobile version, though pretty a great job in its own right, is not yet complete and is still under development. It is not recommended to connect to normal servers with a mobile device, although most server admins don't mind this. There are other test servers for mobile devices. Moreover, the illegal versions from the Play store and elsewhere are older versions (0.4.6, 0.4.8) and may be compromised with software we don't know about. We do not recommend any versions of Minetest from the Play Store. If you wish to use or evaluate Minetest on Android, get them from the official Minetest Downloads page (minetest.net/downloads). See this for more info on the issue http://wiki.minetest.net/Licensing

Try to get in touch with TenPlus here on the forums, or VanessaE on the IRC. Both have extensive experience with managing servers, and will be more than happy to help you out.
7:42 PM - Bauglio: I think if you go to staples you could steal firmware from a fax machine that would run better than win10 does on any platform
7:42 PM - Bauglio: so fudge the stable build
7:43 PM - Bauglio: get the staple build

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by george » Post

hoodedice wrote:3. Kids - The biggest problem, currently. They will hang onto your server and lag out your other, active players. Sometimes, they will play the game all day long.
For the kids reading this, checkout Liberty Land. We have set up our server in such a way that people can play on it, all day even! Really. I know, it's a novel concept. We're weird like that.

Seriously though, if players logging onto your server is a problem, you're doing something wrong. How can you ever expect minetest to be taken seriously if adoption and activity is a problem?

And, hi KzoneDD! Welcome to Minetest :)

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by hoodedice » Post

george wrote:
3. Kids - The biggest problem, currently. They will hang onto your server and lag out your other, active players. Sometimes, they will play the game all day long.
For the kids reading this, checkout Liberty Land. We have set up our server in such a way that people can play on it, all day even! Really. I know, it's a novel concept. We're weird like that.

Seriously though, if players logging onto your server is a problem, you're doing something wrong. How can you ever expect minetest to be taken seriously if adoption and activity is a problem?

And, hi KzoneDD! Welcome to Minetest :)
Well, servers have to be ready beforehand for handling kids. You can't have kids on a server with majority of adults.
7:42 PM - Bauglio: I think if you go to staples you could steal firmware from a fax machine that would run better than win10 does on any platform
7:42 PM - Bauglio: so fudge the stable build
7:43 PM - Bauglio: get the staple build

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by KzoneDD » Post

Wow, great answers! Thank you all for your time & effort.

When I have a few moments I'm goping to dig the i3 out of storage and run it a cat5. See how this will pan out. :)

Thanks again!

(LOVING the mods > server side bit... we had a great server, with no players because of the hassle of getting the extra mods we'd installed... even though everybody loved the concept itself. -Original Revenge Cove, pirate themed, several ship mods including Archimedes, loads of little extra's to set the tone... May do that again. :) )

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by KzoneDD » Post

hoodedice wrote:
george wrote:
3. Kids - The biggest problem, currently. They will hang onto your server and lag out your other, active players. Sometimes, they will play the game all day long.
For the kids reading this, checkout Liberty Land. We have set up our server in such a way that people can play on it, all day even! Really. I know, it's a novel concept. We're weird like that.

Seriously though, if players logging onto your server is a problem, you're doing something wrong. How can you ever expect minetest to be taken seriously if adoption and activity is a problem?

And, hi KzoneDD! Welcome to Minetest :)
Well, servers have to be ready beforehand for handling kids. You can't have kids on a server with majority of adults.
Revenge Cove is billed as "Family Friendly" and "Safe", which amongst others means we have PoC / LGBT and other mature staff looking out especially for the dark sides of gamer culture.

I agree; kids on a server require staff that is extra vigilant. Many a ban hammer came down because of the following two questions in rapid succession: how old are you? Wanna skype?...

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by george » Post

And to actually reply to one of your questions KzoneDD
-I would most likely start off light, say an i3 with 16 Gb RAM and a 50 Mbps up/down pipe. Simply, because that's what I can build from parts I have within reach. How would the game like that as a home? Would it try to escape?
Do you actually have 50Mbps UP? If so, everything else will be just fine, at least in the near future. What do I mean by that? Lets compare to Liberty Land.

Liberty Land currently runs on a $20/month DigitalOcean vps. This gives us: 2GB RAM and two processor cores. Our outgoing bandwidth usage has never exceeded 5Mbps. You can see system and application stats here. Also, you can compare our "players online" with the public server list (experiencing some problems at the moment) and see that we are one of the top servers in terms of active players. Also note that we have over 90 mods running (which is fairly typical but affects performance). And we're doing all that with less than 1s applicaction max_lag (an internal metric of minetestserver)

Considering all this, for the typical peak 30-35 online players that we see right now on most servers, your machine should be golden. Of course, that's not a lot compared to 1000+ but I don't know if there have ever been that many players on a minetest server. We hope to actually reach that, and then I'll have to update this post. :)

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by twoelk » Post

KzoneDD wrote: I agree; kids on a server require staff that is extra vigilant. Many a ban hammer came down because of the following two questions in rapid succession: how old are you? Wanna skype?...
you may want to study the chat on:

IRC: irc.inchra.net, channel #minetest
http://webchat.inchra.net/#minetest

several servers have their ingame chat connected to that irc channel. It can be quite fast paced at peak times.
The irc connection also allows to moderate several servers at the same time without having to be on each server.

The statement "This server is not a dating service" or something similar is among others an automated standard information triggered quite often ;-P

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by KzoneDD » Post

george wrote:And to actually reply to one of your questions KzoneDD
-I would most likely start off light, say an i3 with 16 Gb RAM and a 50 Mbps up/down pipe. Simply, because that's what I can build from parts I have within reach. How would the game like that as a home? Would it try to escape?
Do you actually have 50Mbps UP? If so, everything else will be just fine, at least in the near future. What do I mean by that? Lets compare to Liberty Land.

Liberty Land currently runs on a $20/month DigitalOcean vps. This gives us: 2GB RAM and two processor cores. Our outgoing bandwidth usage has never exceeded 5Mbps. You can see system and application stats here. Also, you can compare our "players online" with the public server list (experiencing some problems at the moment) and see that we are one of the top servers in terms of active players. Also note that we have over 90 mods running (which is fairly typical but affects performance). And we're doing all that with less than 1s applicaction max_lag (an internal metric of minetestserver)

Considering all this, for the typical peak 30-35 online players that we see right now on most servers, your machine should be golden. Of course, that's not a lot compared to 1000+ but I don't know if there have ever been that many players on a minetest server. We hope to actually reach that, and then I'll have to update this post. :)
Thank you!

Right now I do not have 50 Mbps up, but I will in the very near future. Just moved to an area that offers a very good fiber connection, prices are dropping and because I'm now a business owner it's tax-deductible. :) Of course there's other factors like overbooking, but I stick with xs4all, which was once started by actual geeks, not suits and their tech side of things has always been well above average.

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by KzoneDD » Post

twoelk wrote:
KzoneDD wrote: I agree; kids on a server require staff that is extra vigilant. Many a ban hammer came down because of the following two questions in rapid succession: how old are you? Wanna skype?...
you may want to study the chat on:

IRC: irc.inchra.net, channel #minetest
http://webchat.inchra.net/#minetest

several servers have their ingame chat connected to that irc channel. It can be quite fast paced at peak times.

I'm loving this game more and more...

The statement "This server is not a dating service" or something similar is among others an automated standard information triggered quite often ;-P
Tell me, s there a centralized IP ban registry? :)
The irc connection also allows to moderate several servers at the same time without having to be on each server.
Last edited by KzoneDD on Wed Sep 17, 2014 18:06, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by twoelk » Post

:-D

you might want to edit your post and move the reply out of the <quote> section or add extra tags splitting the quote

edit:
hehe, try again ;-P
Last edited by twoelk on Wed Sep 17, 2014 18:10, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by hoodedice » Post

No, there is no central IP banning, and I don't think it is recommended to IP ban anyway.
7:42 PM - Bauglio: I think if you go to staples you could steal firmware from a fax machine that would run better than win10 does on any platform
7:42 PM - Bauglio: so fudge the stable build
7:43 PM - Bauglio: get the staple build

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by KzoneDD » Post

hoodedice wrote:No, there is no central IP banning, and I don't think it is recommended to IP ban anyway.
I see there's issues with it; IP's sometimes still rotate, people can change provider releasing their IP back into the pool, people share IP's... BUT, notorious griefers may necessitate it anyway. Given a good appeals process, the downsides should be manageable.

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by onpon4 » Post

IP bans are probably one of the dumbest ideas ever implemented on the Internet. IP addresses rotate all the time for most people, and evading an IP ban is as easy as finding a proxy: a neighbor, a library, an Internet cafe, or even Tor. What IP bans end up doing is causing massive collateral damage, harming those who share their Internet access and those who have a need to be anonymous the most, and very little benefit in comparison. I can't tell you how frustrating it is when I want to participate in some forum anonymously, but I can't because all Tor nodes have been used by spammers at one point and IP banned. Of course, this isn't likely to apply to Minetest (I don't know if you can even access a Minetest server through Tor); I'm just talking about IP bans in general.

Far better than IP bans is a system of verification to filter out undesirables from the beginning. Actually, many Minetest servers already do this by not giving building privileges to players until they somehow verify that they understand the rules, but it could be taken even further: perhaps you could be required to slowly work your way up to full privileges. Bad griefers just aren't going to come if you have to spend a disproportionate amount of time earning the trust of the server admins first, unless you have an incredible grudge against the server for some reason, and even if you are that devoted, the cases of griefing would be forcibly limited to once every [however long it takes them to get enough privileges], unless they start correctly guessing people's passwords.

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by KzoneDD » Post

onpon4 wrote:IP bans are probably one of the dumbest ideas ever implemented on the Internet. IP addresses rotate all the time for most people, and evading an IP ban is as easy as finding a proxy: a neighbor, a library, an Internet cafe, or even Tor. What IP bans end up doing is causing massive collateral damage, harming those who share their Internet access and those who have a need to be anonymous the most, and very little benefit in comparison. I can't tell you how frustrating it is when I want to participate in some forum anonymously, but I can't because all Tor nodes have been used by spammers at one point and IP banned. Of course, this isn't likely to apply to Minetest (I don't know if you can even access a Minetest server through Tor); I'm just talking about IP bans in general.

Far better than IP bans is a system of verification to filter out undesirables from the beginning. Actually, many Minetest servers already do this by not giving building privileges to players until they somehow verify that they understand the rules, but it could be taken even further: perhaps you could be required to slowly work your way up to full privileges. Bad griefers just aren't going to come if you have to spend a disproportionate amount of time earning the trust of the server admins first, unless you have an incredible grudge against the server for some reason, and even if you are that devoted, the cases of griefing would be forcibly limited to once every [however long it takes them to get enough privileges], unless they start correctly guessing people's passwords.
All valid points, although in the .nl where I live, broadband is now pretty much the norm and a fixed or at least semi-fixed IP also.

Your suggestion works, most MC server owners do something like that, but griefers often exploit holes or gullible staffers...

Ah well, a friend just had a major griefing spree on her private (and wholly unprotected) server, and I'm still po'd about it. :)

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by Kilarin » Post

onpon4 wrote:perhaps you could be required to slowly work your way up to full privileges.
My son was suggesting something exactly like this to me just the other day. He suggested that you could alter the "Achievements" mod to grant privileges for good behavior. You would earn achievement points for building things, for replanting, for mining, etc. And then those "achievement points" could be used to increase the maximum amount of area you could protect with the areas mod, the maximum number of teleport pads you could own, or to grant basic privileges, etc.

I thought it would be a very interesting way to try and encourage good behavior and participation on a server.

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by rubenwardy » Post

That is actually a good idea. I will add support for that in the next release of Achievements, but disabled by default. Adding privileges as rewards to awards, and adding achievement points so other mods can use then, I mean.
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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by Calinou » Post

hoodedice wrote:Hardware: Yes, Minetest is under a process of painful rewriting, and significant optimization. The biggest deal with Minetest is yes, its poor utilization of dedicated GPUs. If you have a intel i3 with like, a R9 290x_2, it will probably not perform as well as an i7 or even an AMD A10. Why? Because the GPU is massively under-utilized. Most of the processing is done on the CPU itself. There was a long post by Celeron55, the guy who started this Minetest thing, explaining why Minetest performs poorly. If I recall correctly, the main kinks were:
You're purely talking about clients here. Yes, the game is quite CPU-bottlenecked, but if you disable some settings like clouds, parallax occlusion and waving stuff, you'll get quite good performance.

KzoneDD: Look at Server performance settings. I use these settings, which decrease CPU and bandwidth usage greatly without affecting user experience much:

Code: Select all

max_block_generate_distance = 5
max_block_send_distance = 5
max_simultaneous_block_sends_per_client = 5
max_simultaneous_block_sends_server_total = 30
time_send_interval = 10
active_block_range = 1
server_map_save_interval = 15.3
If you need a fast yet functional mobs mod, try this one, it's based on PilzAdam's Simple Mobs.

To reduce the amount of “uncontributing” players (in short, players who connect then do nothing useful), you can disallow empty passwords (which helps against accounts being cracked in too), enable strict protocol version checking (which prevents old clients from connecting) or even use a default password, which you disclose somewhere such as a forum topic.

You can give the basic_privs privilege to people you trust: they can grant and revoke the “interact” and “shout” privileges, which respectively lets players interact with the world (such as building) and talk (so they can be muted).

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Re: Some serious questions from a MC server owner

by KzoneDD » Post

Calinou wrote:
hoodedice wrote:Hardware: Yes, Minetest is under a process of painful rewriting, and significant optimization. The biggest deal with Minetest is yes, its poor utilization of dedicated GPUs. If you have a intel i3 with like, a R9 290x_2, it will probably not perform as well as an i7 or even an AMD A10. Why? Because the GPU is massively under-utilized. Most of the processing is done on the CPU itself. There was a long post by Celeron55, the guy who started this Minetest thing, explaining why Minetest performs poorly. If I recall correctly, the main kinks were:
You're purely talking about clients here. Yes, the game is quite CPU-bottlenecked, but if you disable some settings like clouds, parallax occlusion and waving stuff, you'll get quite good performance.

KzoneDD: Look at Server performance settings. I use these settings, which decrease CPU and bandwidth usage greatly without affecting user experience much:

Code: Select all

max_block_generate_distance = 5
max_block_send_distance = 5
max_simultaneous_block_sends_per_client = 5
max_simultaneous_block_sends_server_total = 30
time_send_interval = 10
active_block_range = 1
server_map_save_interval = 15.3
If you need a fast yet functional mobs mod, try this one, it's based on PilzAdam's Simple Mobs.

To reduce the amount of “uncontributing” players (in short, players who connect then do nothing useful), you can disallow empty passwords (which helps against accounts being cracked in too), enable strict protocol version checking (which prevents old clients from connecting) or even use a default password, which you disclose somewhere such as a forum topic.

You can give the basic_privs privilege to people you trust: they can grant and revoke the “interact” and “shout” privileges, which respectively lets players interact with the world (such as building) and talk (so they can be muted).
Thank you! :)

I think I'm going to need a mod to cut down on swearing & name calling... been on a server I won't name, and boy...

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