FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

As Griefers are getting better and better it should be considered about adding a unique ID to a client.

The ID should be unique per computer and not per client, so that deleting a file is not enough.
Lamers have to change the source or manipulate during runtime to circumvent this.

The Unique ID could be drived from the ethernet mac address for example.
just a long CHECKSUM or SHA512 over the mac to make it not easy to go back to the real address.
The real burned in MAC should be used, not the user setable.

Anyway this is a privacy problem, so there should be a one time notice on first startup, where the player has to accept, that a unique id of his system is transmitted to the server.

The Server should be able to ban this unique id instead of ip only.

Also there could be a ID of the client os, so that tablet and smartphone users can be banned too.

Made my day.

dont consider this solution as secure, but better than just ip bans.

you know, that minetest is an open source game, and possible griefers can just disable it?

addi wrote:you know, that minetest is an open source game, and possible griefers can just disable it?

Not all of them will do that. It takes some work to do it.

if its designed to be not easily deactivated, than its not that easy for most griefers!

I don't know of any OS that does expose the real MAC of an adapter.
The MAC is set to the original one by defualt, but it can be changed.

its possible to retrieve the physical mac address over the windows api. i think there is sth. in *nix too.
anyway there are many UUIDs or drive serial numbers around just in case...

another way would be the usage of the hostname and the username. this cant be changed very fast. and if its not much documented griefers wont notice much about this feature in code.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1685 ... atform-way

"and if its not much documented griefers wont notice much about this feature in code."
Security-by-obscurity is not the way to go.

if you have to decide between no security at all or s-b-o you will have to choose s-b-o instead of nothing.
this is always better than doing nothing.