How to stop banned players join spam?

[helldesign 10]

When I ban someone on my server (BE GUID/Ip), he changes his nickname and starts spamming the chat with "battleye kick messages" attempting to join the server again and again.

Example:

http://lachev.com/downloads/banned_nickname_join_spam.jpg (115 kB)

How to stop it?

Thanks.

Edited February 15, 2013 by helldesign

[Ezcoo 47]

Lock your server temporarily (can be done ingame with commands #lock and #unlock or in BE RCon).

You could also block the IP with external program, like PeerBlock, that blocks the IP totally from your server – the user behind the blocked IP can't even see the server in the server list anymore and you won't see any message (except PeerBlock alert message/log entry that's only visible to you) if he somehow managed to attempt joining to the server.

I'd recommend the latter if you have direct access to your server (e.g. hosting from your own PC), because it doesn't restrict the access of other players to the server and the block is also permanent (except if he manages to change his IP).

To prevent it from happening, I'd use less descriptive ban descriptions to avoid that from happening, e.g. "F1.4". If he precisely hacked your server, it's very likely that he did it to get attention which he for sure gets if he keeps joining the server and spamming the ban message, like yelling "Hey, look, I hacked the server!" and thus reaching his goal. What I mean, is that make it less rewarding for the script kiddies to spam the ban message to prevent that from happening.

Hope these tips help you!

[helldesign 10]

Thank you, Ezcoo :cheers:

[HSMagnet 1]

the block is also permanent (except if he manages to change his IP).

most of the world is on dynamic IPs. chances are almost overwhelming that the banned players IP WILL change

[Ezcoo 47]

most of the world is on dynamic IPs. chances are almost overwhelming that the banned players IP WILL change

While that's true, that there are many users with dynamic IPs, based on my personal experience the percentage of them is not that high. It's pretty high but not very high. PeerBlock allows you to ban IP ranges too to make it more difficult to bypass the ban by using dynamic IPs. Also, the people who do the spam joining tend not to know about the dynamic IPs. Usually the change of IP will also take some time, which is often enough to the script kiddie to forget the server that he was spamming.

You can never make it impossible to bypass those (well, whitelisting the server can make it almost impossible), so it's all about getting it to tolerable level. The disappearance of server in the server list with IP – even IP range – bans help to achieve the desired level of difficulty to bypass.

Edit: You're welcome helldesign. :)