Public Server List Reform!

[Vazon]

I suggest we redo the standards for the public server list. There seems to be few problems with the current set up. The list is unfair by just picking the top server on players, so a few of us have come up with a better system. Instead of basing the list on players, we thought using 4 parameters would be better. Weighted votes, age, lag, and alpha would work better than just players and be fair on the newer and older servers alike. Player counts could also be included, but would only count for the equivalent of 2/10 of a vote, capped to 2 votes' worth for any server, and names like admin, and guest**** should be excluded from the figures/formula, to keep from "boosting" the server due to lots of transient names.

Another thing that would be nice, is maybe being able to ban or blacklist servers that do not follow a set of rules set up. This will keep the community a nicer place for the younger group of players. I'm sure if you have little kids who play Minetest, you don't want them playing with people not suited for them to be playing with.

I strongly hope all who read this agree with me and the others who want this reformed.

[CWz]

I think that the clip public server should be excluded from the public server list due to being anarchy server, it gives minetest a bad image and a lot of young players will hate minetest because of how bad things are there. it is probably the cause of most the griefing and misbehaving players on the servers.

[Krock]

I like how it is right now.
Some special "flag" could be set, like "Classic", "Mob-Survival", "Minimal", ..

But I would like to have some clientsided additions:
- A selectbox "Sort by ..."
- Homepage button

@CWz: Freedom! No connect-able servers get excluded!

[CWz]

I fail to see what excluding a server has to do with freedom.

but I understand.

[Megaf]

Maybe.
I think there should be some kind of control.
So, to host a server a person have to do/have the following.

A forum account.
The server must be registered somewhere. Maybe http://trustedservers.minetest.net/ (And the server list would be generated from here).
Create a topic here announcing the server.

That system would have to allow some types of tags, as suggested by Kroc.

This way, moderators of Trusted Servers would be able to easily verify servers and remove them from that list.

[Krock]

The server must be registered somewhere.

suggested by Kroc.

This way, moderators of Trusted Servers would be able to easily verify servers and remove them from that list.

How would you register a server? With an IP which can change sometimes? Per name?

ye. da c'mon typoz

Complicated. One server list is enough - or two: One for [24/7 or ~regular online] and the 2nd for [testing servers and "private" (friends only...)]

[Casimir]

@ Excluding Servers
How about No? It is called "Public Serverlist" because of being public. As soon as there is the possibility for someone to decide what servers go in there it will be abused. CWz would exclude anarchy, Megaf would exclude everyone without a forum account, and someone else might exclude freeminer, or everyone not paying a high fee.
Instead the server owners should be able to provide additional information about their servers. So players can filter their personal view of the list the way they like. E.g. being able to sort by lag, players, uptime, age, etc.

[Vazon]

Casimir, CWz, Megaf:
No servers will be excluded unless they have done or doing something that will give the community a bad rap. Anarchy isnt cuasing any problems its just a different type of server, and a forum account wouldn't do anything but keep good servers from going public or having members. This reform is to help the community in being fair and nicer place, not to start taking out other servers. This is not a competition in any way.

[Calinou]

The person who runs the master server should have the ability to prevent an IP from announcing; useful for servers with bad descriptions (such as hate speech) or servers which fake their player count.

[twoelk]

I wonder wether a script can be made to add the serverlist as a page with a sortable table to the Minetest wiki.

[Vazon]

twoelk:
There is a script already in progress, and its working great. It just needs a few tweaks.

[twoelk]

twoelk:
There is a script already in progress, and its working great. It just needs a few tweaks.

really?
I have been watching the progress to design a formula for a new master server page but you might have missread as I was thinking of the possability of adding a customized page to the Minetest WIKI. Such a dynamic list on a wiki might be difficult to implement and would of course list information usefull for the Wiki and not list for example the players on each server.

[Vazon]

twoelk:
Sounds like something that would be nice but what would the Minetest Wiki have to do with the public server??

[Wuzzy]

I think that the clip public server should be excluded from the public server list due to being anarchy server, it gives minetest a bad image and a lot of young players will hate minetest because of how bad things are there. it is probably the cause of most the griefing and misbehaving players on the servers.

I don’t know if your claims about the server are true. But it does not matter for now. I am strongly against delisting any server solely for its policy, or in this case a lack thereof.
Of course one is free to delist any server one wants to but you go a dangerous road of quasi-censorship. Yeah, you can’t prevent that people visit servers like that, but you propose to make it just inconvenient. This decision is authotarian because indirectly you are softly forcing servers to have some anti-griefing policy. Because you wish to have servers without that policy to delist. This makes these servers much less visible and you are effectively punishing them. But punishing servers, no matter which justification, would result in an even more biased list. This thread is about how to get rid of the bias, not to introduce more bias.
And I don’t care about Minetest’s image. If people think Minetest is the griefer game just because of one server, they are being irrational. If people don’t want to play Minetest, I am completely fine with that. Popularity should not be a main goal (if at all) of Minetest. For me, the main goal of Minetest is to make a game / game engine which works.

I have a compromise suggestion: Do not exclude servers from the list itself. Instead, servers could be able to publish some additional standarized flags about which policies they have or the lack thereof. Some of these flags could be:

• Don’t grief
• Don’t use nerd-poling (funny, I actually saw a server with that rule)
• Don’t <do whatever>
• No rules (of course this flag makes no sense when other policy flags are used)

If there are no policy flags, it does not neccessarily mean there are no policies. It just means the server does not say weather or not there are policies.

With such flags, everyone can easily filter on their own needs. It is important that by default, no filtering should be applied, anything else would still result in a biased list, which would be morally questionable. And you could of course filter all those “anarchist” servers if you don’t like them.

Besides: Welcome to the Internet! The place where kids, anarchists, terrorists, fuckwads, trolls, cat-lovers, mothers and programmers (sometimes all in one person!) meet. ;-)

Besides 2: Generally I also think you are very rude by suggesting to exclude a server from the list without at least talking to or just even informing the server operators or the server users. Even if you have something against the server, you should have the guts to express yourself in the server’s thread instead of just attepting to “backstab” it.

------------- (imagine a long horizontal line here) -------------

Back to topic: I agree that the current system is biased towards popular servers. This is bad. Popular servers are likely to be rewared by even more popularity, just because they have a good list place.
So a reform is a good idea.

But I am not very happy with the initial proposal either. The poll did not consider that opinion, so it is a poor poll and won’t help with the issues.

Weighted votes, age, lag, and alpha

I don’t think votes would help, especially I don’t think weighted votes would help. This is likely to put even more bias into the list, and, if the votes are also weighted, some influential voters could basically “tailor” the list as they wish. The bias would be perfect. I am also skeptical of an equal votes (aka 1 player = 1 vote) system. Other players have other needs and wishes for servers and so they’d rate them based on different criteria. I doubt how the average of those ratings, which are all based on a lot of different things, is going to help ME to find the servers I want.

I am unsure about age. How is this defined? If a server X steadily run for 10 years, then the server was turned off (intentionally or not) and returns after a hour or so, it the age resetted to 0 again? If so, then age alone would be a very poor criterion. A better criterion would be the uptime/downtime ration plus the time it last started
Lag (aka latency) is very important to know and definetely should be visible to the client.
I have no idea what you mean with “alpha”.

One comment about age:
What about letting the server publish planned downtimes for the server list. This would be incredibly useful for servers which are not up 24/7 but are still visible in the list so they can say “We are down now, but we will be up again on 8 ’o clock”. Maybe the public list should delist servers which are down for more than 7 days or so, because what would be the point of a server if it is down for so long?

I think the raw number of connected players should still be available as a data point. It is simply interesting to know.

Generally, I think the in-game list should expose much more information about the servers. Especially the latency. It would be a helpful feature to filter out servers based on user-selected criteria.

To make the server list as neutral as possible, I suggest to initially show the servers either in random order (full neutrality) or sorted by latency (not neutral, but I justify this by latency being technically very important; high latency servers are unplayable and deserve less attention). And that no filters are applied by default, but the user can enable them.

Just my 2 cents on the Public Server List Reform. :)

[Vazon]

Wuzzy:
Thanks for your 2 cents :). And Votes are being worked out so no spamming and there is a cap on voting. It is all just to put the best servers best fitted to be at the top, at the top of the list. There is also a regulations on the age, like 48 hours is a must or something like that.

The reason we are tossing the amount of players is because players are more drawn to the place that has the most players so its unfair, and the reform is about being fair to the servers and their owners.

The flags seem like a good idea, I will bring up the idea with the others.

[CWz]

snip

You are reading way to deep into what i wrote.

advice: feel free to express yourself. but do NOT bash people on their heads with your views and opinions .
[quote=d]That "proposal" wasn't a proposal nor a suggestion it was an opinion. learn to tell the difference.[/quote]

[ShadowNinja]

Uptime should not be used, as good servers restart frequently for backups.
There are servers that should be banned for good reason, and the current serverlist has support for a ban list (util/master/master.cgi line 84).
Votes may be a good idea, but require more persistence. Servers have to be saved even when they're down.
As for "Guest[0-9]+" and "Admin" names: The automatic names were a bad idea to begin with and should just be removed from the client.
Client count sorting is bad, because it keeps servers that were recently added to the list at the bottom, which makes it harder for them to get clients and rise to the top. And servers that have gotten clients keep getting more and never drop. I think that the start time should be taken into account, so new servers get listed higher even if they have few clients or other (minor) issues.

[mauvebic]

Wuzzy:
Thanks for your 2 cents :). And Votes are being worked out so no spamming and there is a cap on voting. It is all just to put the best servers best fitted to be at the top, at the top of the list. There is also a regulations on the age, like 48 hours is a must or something like that.

The reason we are tossing the amount of players is because players are more drawn to the place that has the most players so its unfair, and the reform is about being fair to the servers and their owners.

The flags seem like a good idea, I will bring up the idea with the others.

I gather some people are upset that they're spending money on hosting for servers and averaging a big ole' 0 players? If thats the case why not just charge them for the top spots and hardcode it. No matter how you setup the list people are gonna find ways to game it, and the same complaints will come up again.

Personally I dont see a problem with the current setup, it's like this for every other game. No one likes to join a dead server, they want to go where the people are at, and if you stick a bunch of dead or sleepy servers at the top, people are gonna think MT is dead and go play something else.

[Vazon]

Wuzzy:
Thanks for your 2 cents :). And Votes are being worked out so no spamming and there is a cap on voting. It is all just to put the best servers best fitted to be at the top, at the top of the list. There is also a regulations on the age, like 48 hours is a must or something like that.

The reason we are tossing the amount of players is because players are more drawn to the place that has the most players so its unfair, and the reform is about being fair to the servers and their owners.

The flags seem like a good idea, I will bring up the idea with the others.

I gather some people are upset that they're spending money on hosting for servers and averaging a big ole' 0 players? If thats the case why not just charge them for the top spots and hardcode it. No matter how you setup the list people are gonna find ways to game it, and the same complaints will come up again.

Personally I dont see a problem with the current setup, it's like this for every other game. No one likes to join a dead server, they want to go where the people are at, and if you stick a bunch of dead or sleepy servers at the top, people are gonna think MT is dead and go play something else.

I do not think having to pay for the top spot would go well with community. Since this is free open-source, no one will be willing to pay for a top spot and will leave us exactly where we currently are.

[mauvebic]

Whichever way you set it up, some people are going to be advantaged, and others disadvantaged - and they'll find new ways to game the system. You're opening up a can of worms.

[Vazon]

Anything is better than it is now

[Amaz]

Anything is better than it is now

+1

[Krock]

Anything is better than it is now

+1

-1 Not anything is better.

[Amaz]

Anything is better than it is now

+1

-1 Not anything is better.

Hm, yes. You are right.

[twoelk]

. . . You're opening up a can of worms.

well then lets try some different cans of worms. Some might not taste as bad as they look.

-but I do agree this is a minefield type of issue and any change should be considered with great care. Especially any active moderation of the master serverlist. I do have the personall opinion though that freedom is not the same as anarchy. So a "rather liberal" set of basic rules might not be a bad idea.

What I would consider really usefull though would be a sortable list and filters. At least the one at http://servers.minetest.net/ should be sortable as implementing that into the game-ui might be too difficult and just clutter up the menu. For the game I think a configurable filtersystem might be more usefull. Concerned parents (which I do hope exist) that actively monitor the activities of their underage kids in the web could then for example hide servers that do not dissallow foul language, if such a flag exists of course. Maybe some checkboxes could be included in the menu, so that today I could search for creative servers only, while tomorrow I might be only interested in servers that allow pvp.

[mauvebic]

Well the way see it... not content with regulating mods to death by telling people where to host and how to license, now ya'll wanna do the same thing with servers by knocking off populars ones you don't agree with and coming up with a magic formula that's garanteed to put certain ones at the top without being too obvious. I have pretty good idea which servers those are too because when I ran one I used to get player poachers all the time trying to plug the same ones.

Funny thing is, there's nothing stopping dead server owners from advertising on here, or redesigning their setup to offer the experience players actually want. However convoluted a (non)solution you come up with, anyone can look at the source and see what stats are being reported to serverlist and change them.

[WebWolf]

(...) Maybe some checkboxes could be included in the menu, so that today I could search for creative servers only, while tomorrow I might be only interested in servers that allow pvp.

This seems a good idea. It remembers the "old" CS (Counter Strike) game, where the player is (was) able to select what kind of list he would see (number of online players, ping/lag, what type of server [creative, survival, pvp and so on]).

Nice. :)

[Sokomine]

Client count sorting is bad, because it keeps servers that were recently added to the list at the bottom, which makes it harder for them to get clients and rise to the top. And servers that have gotten clients keep getting more and never drop.

There's nothing that seems to be more attractive to new players than other players. They have no means to judge quality of a server at the beginning and will base their decision on where most people are.

In its current state, the public server list provides very few helpful information. At least it's there and people can find servers - which is a great improvement compared to older versions of MT.

It's not easy to find criteria which might be relevant for the majority of players. The state of PvP (disabled, only on mutual agreement, encouraged), the suitability for serious builders (server maintainer knows what backups are, buildings are kept over map changes, tools useful for building installed, ...), the presence of mobs - all that might be more relevant in the end than lag. Players ending up on the wrong server won't have too much fun.

Something that might also help would be a flag indicating weather mobile clients are welcomed or not. Even the official android client does have issues with too much media data. Perhaps amount of nodes defined and size of media cache that needs to be downloaded ought to be displayed. The list of mods installed might also be pretty intresting. Perhaps even a tiny picture of the spawn area. In general, selecting a server ought to provide more information than that short text which is shown currently and which is cut off if one uses a larger font size.

[sapier]

It's quite easy to demand a better way of listing, but to all of those just doing +1 to this request, have you ever thought about **HOW** to do it? This is the real challenge!
If yes, write your ideas down, keep in mind that ALL information serverlist has about a server is:

1) Ping time from serverlist machine to server
2) IP of server
3) Some information provided by server itself

That's all (correct me if you find more) .. you have to consider that 3 may or may not be correct and it's no issue to spoof it.

[Sokomine]

Is it possible to let the server provide further information without too much trouble? A longer, readable description might be very helpful already. The symbols which are currently shown (by Freeminer at last) are not particulary intuitive.