[dahalb]

It might also be worthwhile considering a 2-fold test before removal of the bounty. The offending cargo is removed and the pilot has docked at an external (not the one he stole from) station. In this scenario, if he is downed, then both are true because he no-longer has the cargo and his pod is at a station (assuming not a POS), if he docks but does not sell the contraband, then the bounty stays. If he is burgled then the bounty stays until he docks. This makes stripping, something that is possible but difficult to get away with on your own. The exception would be while in unreg. Once you make it to unreg then the factions would lose track of you and be unable to confirm your status. Once you re-appear in reg space, a quick scan would determine if you still had the contraband tho.

[daslog]

Innominate once made a database application that used the information from JOSSH to figure out exactly who was buying commodities, when they were buying them, and where they were sold.

He also was able to figure out who was transferring money between their primary and secondary accounts, so he could rip the seconds as well.

He got banned.

[SingleShot]

I always thought "The Eye" was a great idea.

SADS always seemed a bit basic, imo.

[Ambrosius]

Originally Posted by daslog

Innominate once made a database application that used the information from JOSSH to figure out exactly who was buying commodities, when they were buying them, and where they were sold.

He also was able to figure out who was transferring money between their primary and secondary accounts, so he could rip the seconds as well.

He got banned.

Not quite right. You cannot figure out "exactly" anything, but you can get strong evidence. The problem with Inno was not the database itself, but how he used it -- that's what got him banned.

Isorg's database did much the same thing. He didn't get banned.

[dahalb]

llamas like that should be banned IMHO. Just play the game. If you have a problem with someone character then deal with that character, dont bring it into RL and then take it back to the game. That just blows chunks. Build a bridge and get over your self is all i can say to those ppl.

With Ambro's idea, i also agree that the PR hit should be permanent. The smugglers should have to work to continue their profession not be able to do it for "free" when it comes to PR.

[daslog]

Originally Posted by Ambrosius

Not quite right. You cannot figure out "exactly" anything, but you can get strong evidence. The problem with Inno was not the database itself, but how he used it -- that's what got him banned.

Isorg's database did much the same thing. He didn't get banned.

I probably should have explained where I was going with this. It's easy to police individual abusers when there are only a few hundred active players. When we hit 10,000+ players it will quickly spiral out of control.

Just something to think about.

[Ambrosius]

With 10,000+ players it would also be a lot more resource-intensive for the "abusers" to do the stat-tracking.

Frankly you can never truly police this kind of activity, since the only people you can catch are those that publicize that they are (ab)using it. The only way to control it is to eliminate pilot stat pages, or perhaps, post them, in a format that cannot be "grabbed." This would make Jump cry.

[daslog]

Originally Posted by Ambrosius

With 10,000+ players it would also be a lot more resource-intensive for the "abusers" to do the stat-tracking.

I was thinking it would be easier, as there would be more people developing automated applications to do the data analysis.

Frankly you can never truly police this kind of activity, since the only people you can catch are those that publicize that they are (ab)using it. The only way to control it is to eliminate pilot stat pages, or perhaps, post them, in a format that cannot be "grabbed." This would make Jump cry.

[/quote]

No easy answers, that's for sure.

[Ambrosius]

Originally Posted by daslog

I was thinking it would be easier, as there would be more people developing automated applications to do the data analysis.

Well Jump could speak to this better than I, but I would think that the average Joe with a shared webhost account could have issues with the amount of data grabbed and the frequency. To track transactions like this, I think you's have to be parsing online pilot stat pages each cycle -- so first you parse the online pilots page to create your search array (which, for example, may yield 8,000 online pilots) and then individually parse 8,000 pilot pages and dump them to your database . . . every six minutes.

I'm not sure that you would not have to parse every pilot page (online and offline) to make this work.

[netburnr]

Not to mention the load that would cause on the ND servers if multiple people tried to pull 8000 pilot pages every 6 minutes.

[Tritian]

i dont think it'd be that load-intensive. in the grand scheme of things, it's a very small plain-text file. I think Jumpgate updates it every 5 mins or so, right?

You also wouldn't need specific web-hosting, per say. My IP address hasn't changed in over a year, even though technically it's a dynamic IP. People with similar setups could use something like DynDNS to have a static hostname for people to access the page.

You'd need to set up some type of chron job to activate possibly a perl or php script once every 5 mins. From that point the script would grab the file from ND's servers and parse it/save information to a mysql database.

Then you have a seperate php page on your web server so that when people connect to your hostname and access the page, it grabs the data from the mysql db and format/displays it.