Blacklist
From AssaultCube
A blacklist (also known as a blocklist or banlist) is a list of IP addresses and ranges used to ban certain players (or, in extreme cases, ISPs) from playing on a server. These are made available by players themselves, and are not under the control of AssaultCube developers. Common reasons for a player's inclusion in a blacklist are:
- cheating,
- player impersonation,
- team killing,
- Abusing the master role.
On an unmodified server, bans last only 20 minutes. However, the need soon arose for a more permanent banning method, and server owners started to block IP addresses through iptables or by modifying their servers. Lists of known troublesome IP addresses have been made available so server admins can easily block them from playing on their servers.
IP address banning is often criticized due to many people having dynamic IP addresses, allowing them to simply change their IP address to evade the ban. Range bans (also known as subnet bans) are sometimes more effective for banning players with dynamic IP addresses. The downside of this is the chance of some other innocent player or players being banned as well. Even when banning by only one IP address, you run the risk of banning multiple players because some ISPs assign the same IP address to all of their customers.
An alternative is MAC address banning, but AssaultCube does not transmit players' MAC addresses to the server, and MAC addresses can be spoofed.
