Like Carlos I had always felt that metaservers should be neutral, but I have changed. The change may not be permanent, but the results so far have been spectacular. It is difficult to endorse or punish via information flows, since there is not a single metaserver. The metaserver I'm running has changed policy. The policy is only effective while there are few players. The policy has limited long term impact, because: 1. clients can be written to use both metaservers and merge the results, (the COW code on Linux does that with my UDP metaserver query mode, added in 1999, which still hasn't hit the Windows client code base ... I'm sure the current Windows clients can follow the trend), 2. servers now respond to metaserver queries, and clients can be configured to query them directly, (again, code contributed by me, this time in February 2006, currently in COW on Linux and the Vanilla source), 3. players can learn how to avoid the restrictions, especially with enthusiasts begging them on continuum to learn how to type "netrek -h something", and spamming the message board with pro-sturgeon political statements, or advertisements for clients, 4. in the same way that players know to circumvent bans by changing IP addresses, server owners know very well that they could change their hostname or IP address to circumvent the policy. (I was actually encouraged by some to turn off the UDP solicit mode, te he). Regarding the player count, or robots reported as players problem ... before we opened the metaservers to allow anyone to list a server, we were able to enforce some unwritten policies ... such as non-offensive hostnames, servers that actually can be logged into, etc. With the UDP solicitation, we lack any of those controls, and so I feel a touch more justified in exerting some control on "my" metaserver. Regarding previous policy, a minor observation ... when RSA client binary verification was first implemented, the metaserver followed suite by reporting whether a server was compiled with RSA. The metaserver didn't restrict what servers were returned. Now we learn that the R flag doesn't identify whether the server actually demands verification at the time. Patches welcome. -- James Cameron mailto:quozl at us.netrek.org http://quozl.netrek.org/ -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: Digital signature Url : http://mailman.us.netrek.org/pipermail/netrek-dev/attachments/20061125/a7fc3fe9/attachment-0001.pgp