It will be some time off before I try to set up my own game for others to play, if I ever do decide to take that big step, but I was wondering if anyone had any ideas to help with controlling dupes? I would like to get some ideas of how to watch for it and how to stop it, so that if I ever do decide to start up a game I will stand some chance of not being over-run by dupes, hehe

I have just had a bad exp with a dupe case best thing you can do is make it a closed server where you set up accounts for people but if you are just starting your server i would not set it as closed right away
Strider

The most successful way of doing it has been through a web site where you have to join a game and it sends you a user name and pw like Coast Games and Lost Traders Tavern. Other than that you have to monitor IP's and watch for corp members that all have the same passwords...stuff like that.

New server, allow new accounts for the first week or two, and then close the game and take new players by email request only. Most dupes usually get into the game after a battle or when a player or players get upset about something in the game and start duping. For example in the LotR game, Hrvat's friend $hit$tomper got upset at Graz and started duping to get revenge on him for what he thought was cheating. If the game was closed at that time, he couldn't create dupe accounts. IIRC this was like 16 days after the game started. Graz was attacking anyone who got close to our planet because we had most of our figs and colonists there.

There was no need for duping as the planet had 50K colonists working on Fuel Ore and had a large amount of figs on it. Graz tried to take over the planet and got quasar blasted into a pod.

Besides the dupes only had 50 figs on them, and Graz capped each ship and I am sure sold it to the Stardock for more figs. The dupes could have been used to moth planets or sweep mines, so you can see how they could upset a game.

There are exceptions like a player who has two email addresses and can play two accounts. You need to check IP addresses for that.

I've seen scripts that monitor the server for dupes.

i would be interested in seeing those and how they work any idea where i could find them
Strider

Theres got to be some way of logging the incoming ip adresses. Just create a script to check them for repeats and such

The IP address of people joining a game are logged in each game's log file.

There is a dupe catcher script on the bottom of Vid Kids web site.
http://www.geocities.com/videotees/twars.html