Aww, I wanted to post to him something along the lines of “YOU JACK OFF TO TUBGIRL, 2GIRLS1CUP *AND* SWAP.AVI! YOU ****ING SICK ****!”

Eh, So be it.

Evil Trout Posted:

There was no rule against spamming before, however we clearly stated that we don’t approve of bots that impact the performance of the site.

MST had scripted 10 alts to spam every 30 seconds to get around the flood detection. You don’t do something like that without the thought “hey, maybe I am doing something wrong” crossing your mind.

We also didn’t have a rule that you couldn’t embed links that would delete every major klan, but we permabanned him for that the first time around.

As for people claiming that it’s our fault for setting emails to send by default: would it be our fault if he created a DDOS attack that raised our bandwidth bill through the roof? There’s no “rule” against that. But I’m pretty sure nobody would object if we banned a user for doing that.

The reason no one would object to that is that the obvious intent of that is to cost you whereas this thing is just for fun. I personally wouldn’t ban tom for this, I would just change the email setting so that it only emails you with announcements, ie “Episode 2 has been released”.

Evil Trout Posted:

MST had scripted 10 alts to spam every 30 seconds to get around the flood detection. You don’t do something like that without the thought “hey, maybe I am doing something wrong” crossing your mind.

I’m going to disagree with you here, boss.

I believe he was going for the Flamebate epeen on the banned account. Pretty funny IMO. And as has been discussed above, the most effective way of doing that has been to spam tubmail. People have done it before, manually. Tom wrote a script to do that job for him, with a damn entertaining and effective tubmail content. (Just witness the, what are we up, 100 reports about hitting the haxxor page following the link?)

The key thing here, which is why I believe you banned him, was the cost of the resultant e-mails. I don’t think that was ever his intent; I know I never think when I send a tubmail “Oh, and I’m probably sending so-and-so an email as well. I wonder how that impacts CZ’s email limit, which I was unaware of until two days ago?”

I also don’t think that the bots caused undue server stress. People have used them to post in the “consecutive posts in a row” contests with no known issues.

So unless you have some sort of proof of intent to cause you problems with this particular stunt (easy enough to check, I’d think, in his klan forums), I think he’s being punished for a completely unintended side-effect of what should have been innocuous fun.

Evil Trout Posted:

We also didn’t have a rule that you couldn’t embed links that would delete every major klan, but we permabanned him for that the first time around.

As to that, I think we did have the “causing users to perform actions against their will” clause at the time, so that one was justified.

Sneaky27 Posted:

You know, that makes it seem like anybody who interferes with what you want in any way will get the permaban for it.

I know that’s not the case, just what it looks like.

It does? How?

I didn’t permaban him, ET did. I was just expressing to you why I disagreed with your suggestion.

IMO, tom has never done anything that should have been doable in the first place. He has just found holes in security in the site, that (until this time) have been free to fix and improved the site.

I’m not sure whether he would have done this knowing the costs you would incur or not, but I DO know that he didn’t know about it before he did it.

He made a thread with this idea in our klan forums before he did it, saying both that he “wanted Myspace Tom to get the flamebate e-peen” and wanted to “annoy the hell out of Jalapeno” (lol), that’s it.

If you are going to ban people for illegally topping leaderboards, then maybe TUBSWEETIE should be banned for his flezz ****. If this was just about the money, then maybe you should make the amount you paid because of this public. I bet that some people might buy BPs enough to cover your costs to unban him (ie me) if that is the case.

Tom at least made things interesting around here, so I would hate to see him gone again. Is there anything that can be done to bring him back?

Like many others, I don’t think Tom knew about the corresponding emails or that there would be a limit to how many emails constituted extra money required for server costs.

It’s most unfortunate IMO that he got nailed for something that wasn’t an epic hack last he has done in the past. Although it was a very good scheme this time.

So is tubmail spamming not a bannable offense, as long as people don’t overkill the server quota?

First off, I’ll be the first to admit there has to be some better protocol in place as far as banning/permabanning/IP banning and granting amnesty to obvious “replacement” accounts like MySpace’s latest. See the latest thread about Hobart for another example.

That said, I agree with Evil Trout on this one, even though we haven’t even had a chance to discuss this. We have Tubmail limits in place, right? So by coming up with a scheme to cirgreat timesvent those limits, it should be obvious that he was breaking the spirit, if not the letter of our rules. And with so many complexities and variables on a site like ours, that’s as valid as banning someone for breaking a rule already in place. We can’t possibly foresee every possibility. Also, it should be noted that in order to stop his spambots from continuing to jam up the works, we would’ve had to ban him to freeze his account anyway.

There’s also the fact that he was spamming every player with a fake mission in order to vie for a leadership Peen (that would’ve been stripped anyway). We don’t condone the use of scripts to game the system generally, but especially not when it affects other players. Some of you claim to think his mission idea was “cool,” but the point is, it wasn’t a mission at all. It was an attempt to use you so that he could top the leaderboard.

That said, I disagree with ET for ever allowing MySpace Tom back in the first place — although he never contacted us to ask us if that’s okay, his presence was simply accepted for reasons that are beyond me. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re banned, you’re banned. Somehow, MySpace slipped through the cracks once again. According to MCB, Trout was cool with letting him back in “as long as he followed the rules.”

My contention is that he would never have stuck to the rules. So why bother? He’s a dangerous, career criminal and he’s not to be trusted. I wouldn’t let a pedophile near a playground, and I damn sure wouldn’t let MySpace Tom anywhere near Forumwarz.

Just to make my personal position clear: To me, whether or not he broke a written rule is a non-issue. The nature of the punishment he should receive for these antics is a non-issue. The only issue is: MySpace Tom was permabanned. He came back. Now he’s in his rightful place again, which is in permanent exile.

I’m not saying a player can never change his spots. I’m not saying we’ll never grant amnesty. But in this case, it was a huge mistake letting him back, and it would never happen under my watch.

Is having MST around fun: yes

Problem solved!

Evil Trout Posted:

Let’s put it this way: right now sending more than one tubmail every 30 seconds is a bannable offense.

Why is is possible to play multiple alts simultaneously anyway? It’s just one player, how can they do two things at the same time? This affects other areas of the game as well, and there’s plenty of scope for it to affect things alot more, without some basic limits put in place. If I have say 10 alts, and can script stuff for those alts to do automatically and remotely, that’s going to have an impact on your resources, no matter what it is the scripts do.