Nice. If you're trying to design to out think the way someone will abuse a loophole, you will never finish this project. Great work, i like these types of ideas.
I like the idea of no 1 knowing who is online or who is in the game would be a nice change.

There are already settings for that, nobody uses them because they aren't popular.

well there you go , take away menu and force a set of online viewers to report back over IRC ... humm just another advantage for the scripts.

Should just leave it as it is .. I'll make my menu script public so everyone can hang at the menu to help John sell more nodes

So if its private and you as the SysOp whom is serving the game to a closed group say no menu watching ....
Why is the fix needed ?
This eludes me , this does not seem to be a private server issue .. but a public
tourney issue maybe ?

I agree with you there. But it's needed because I have gameops requesting it and I try to be responsive to the requests of my customers.

Currently you can only hide the ones in game, not the node menu. Slight difference. Plus you never know what a sysop will use if the tools are available.

I could probably extend that setting out to the TWGS menu so you don't see nodes for someone in a game that hides "who's online", or else it just doesn't show what game the player is in.

You and me both
Im willing to pay large for it and all the hvs modules (2-3 I would love to update to a modern interface), but thats something best discussed elsewhere.

Likely best to make them ON/OFF displays, some of us enjoy seeing who's on and the scores for the info, not for use as a bot/cheat attack stradegy.