Do you happen to recall what other threads this topic was discussed? More specifically, what threads that John actually said this was not an option to consider?

I read the link you gave me and I missed some of that discussion as I had returned from deployment and had to settle some affairs on my return. I don't see anywhere in that thread where John said it would not be considered. I've seen reasons from others as to why it is a good idea, and I can understand their point of view. I'm trying to see the reasons why it would not be a good idea.

All the threads with John responding to questions on that issue and others from Oct 9 thru Nov 8 are missing. A search of the forum will verify this .

I was away during that time on assignment and returned on 3 Nov, so I missed these discussions. Were these missing posts originally here in the TWGS Beta section?

Both Vid kid and big d had threads discussing the idea of a corp channel with John.

This discussion was because of the subspace crawling "primarily" the all qss response from mombot which allows you to find someones SS in a 15 hours. or 1.5 hours if you have 10 peeps searching.

It was brought up twice and shot down by John twice.
His thoughts were that a bit a espionage adds spice to the game and I agree with him.

But now that the can of worms is opened those that opened it want it closed (or some of them)

I feel that timing test on the beta server are more to the benefit than h screen or subspace options as ALL game play depends on the timings.

I went to get the threads but all of John's posts for a month are now missing for some reason. and yes they were in beta.

I saw Vid's comments in another post regarding SS, but I too could not find any of John's posts or any indication from him that is was rejected. I'll have to e-mail him directly to ask him to bring me up to speed so I can update the list of items that are being changed/rejected/working on, etc.



Methods for gathering intel has been around for years and years. As a matter of fact, our unit is trained in the "communication" field and one of the techniques we train the new recruits on is how to utilize methods to "intercept" any intel or other information. It was done long before TradeWars even came to be. I can see how it is a viable tactic, and I can understand how some want it changed to make it more "secure". In the end, if it happens, it happens. If not, we move on, and create ways around the problem.

this is not directed at you specifically, Parrothead; just your quote gave me the ammo i needed.

i wasn't in the game, so i didn't know how the attack was implemented until now, but it seems to me that the only reason this attack works at all is because everyone is running bots that respond to anyone on the channel. i've had a subspace eavesdropper for years, but it has to wait on a channel for a certain amount of time to hear idle chatter to confirm the channel is valid, which made it completely unworkable over 60,000 channels. i think this is on the players to make their bots validate users. my bot has always had a valid user list so it would ignore commands sent by unauthorized members. it's irresponsible to have such insecure bots and now it's coming back to bite you. this has nothing at all to do with game mechanics - it's all brought on by bot mechanics.

stop whining and fix your scripts.

all that being said, i think there is one thing that JP could improve to make this kind of security fully feasible. when you send a subspace message, the only thing we get to identify you is the first six characters of your name (unless you switch to verbose style messages, which is annoying). there could be more than one player in the game with the same first six characters. so it's possible for players to impersonate another player, though it is a pain. i think it would be a good move to enforce a policy in the game that players must create unique names in the first six characters.

@rev
Mombot does validate users, you have to login via corp
message before you can run any command. The problem
is that when you aren't logged in, it will tell you to login
if you send a message on SS. So while you can't run
commands as a non-validated user, it still sends a msg.

This has since been changed. Most people are now running
versions that no longer respond to "all" via SS. That keeps
the user friendliness of having a "log in to use" msg, but
makes it much tougher to pull off the attack (you have to
know someone's bot name, and thats easy to change). Some
people have removed all of the non-validated replies just to
be safe.

That said, in hht we never used this particular hack. We
just gave the appearance that we did by spamming "all
qss" across all 60k channels in a macro. Knowing that it
would take much less time, and knowing that they'd still
freak out, it was a better choice than actually crawling SS.
This was used during a time when they were trying to get
setup for their first day cashing. It gave us time to find
their SDT spot, and torp their reds, giving us a nice 1st day
advantage.

It took helix only a few hours each time we ran it, and KB
made this even easier by sending me an ICQ almost every
time it happened. At one point, we narrowed down their SS
to a fairly small (5k) range, making it trivially easy to give
the appearance that we had found their SS. Despite having
this explained to them, most of their team still thinks we did,
which I find infinitely funny.

@sing

psychological warfare - nice. i love it. then again, as long as cashing scripts don't announce sector numbers, it wouldn't be a security risk to have enemies eavesdropping on your subspace channel.

The problem is they had like 15 ppl, and trying to
coordinate all of them is difficult. Sector numbers
get spilled sometimes.

I didn't find them that way tho. One of our corpies
was running a CIM hunter and saw a strange port
drop in %, then go dark.

One of mombot's problems tho, many of its modules
do announce sector numbers. In fact commands like
twarp are done by sending sector numbers over SS.
"bot twarp 1234" and the like.

Me too Rev. Good Stuff,
Perhaps next time your in a game against me
I will call your family on the phone constantly @ 3 am...Cuz u know...
"psychological warfare - nice. ""I love it". I think you need to rethink your joy here.
I would never do such a thing but other have and will when pushed to far.

Or perhaps you want to be a CEO and have half your team refuse to play other than leaving there bots on because such tricks ruined the experience. Good Stuff!! Merry Xmas! I Love it!

"Rev."?? Unlikely. You are lacking in Good Book skills my friend. Jesus wouldn't Subspace Crawl.

I know you are going to go on and on on how it is different.
But you might want to rethink your position on that one as this "psych warfare" can quickly get out of hand.Maybe people should just play the game and never mind the stupidity.

I had a conversation with Helix on our Subspace and the logs were posted to prove it.
This constant denial is pointless. However the conversation was with Helix not Sing so he doesn't know.
He will no doubt Troll once again with denials but I don't know why he bothers.

Mombot is a public script which was abandoned by its developers because bug fixing the plagiarized code was too time consuming a task.And drove all its "writers" away from the game. So to say "fix" your scripts is meaningless as those that use Mombot don't script or they would have there own bot or at the very least a rewritten version of mombot that solved the issues.


Bot that don't talk back to the user to confirm a command was completed cause much more problems than they are worth. Some of us remember the stbot days of incomplete commands and stuck bots.
Mombot is not a huge improvement but its modular so the modules tend to get jammed not the main bot.

Waiting for "twarp 12345" on a subspace channel is going to take months.

Sector number spam by cashing scripts is not strictly necessary but if you want to trap MCIC data then it helps. Also many tried and true scripts like sst & jet do so for furbing reasons. FIxing the bot bug is enough. Changing the game and rewriting a dozen scripts because Sing can't be an adult is over the top.

A "all qss" bug or similar is required to make crawling worthwhile.
So adding Corp Channels etc is just a waste of time.

lol!




i think this is spot on. a lot of 'features' are getting proposed, which really dont seem to be thought all the way thru... there are a lot of features now which dont get used...

@phead

Some stuff is inside the game, some stuff is outside
the game. Calling someone at 3am is outside the
game. That's res-style stuff there.

The "logs" you posted proved that we didn't crawl.
But you're going to believe what you want. I still
find it funny.

If your scripts are broken, fix em.