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Jean Lafitte

The Atlas Public Stockade

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Once upon a time, @Jatheish responded to one of my threads and said he was considering what he called "a wall of shame" that would basically put on public display anyone who was banned from the game for cheating/using exploits. It would seem that he's been a bit busy or he's still undecided as to whether this is a good idea or not.

Also, one of the things I've been curious about is some really far-out claims that Grapeshot is not banning any Chinese.

Since I don't have the same tough decisions to make that Jat does, and curiosity killed the cat, I decided to do it myself and see of any if those claims were true.

I got bored today and decided to write a quick WordPress plugin and slap it on one of my test sites.  Basically, it grabs the steam ID's from the Atlas banlist here: http://atlasdedicated.com/pc/banlist.txt

It then polls the Steam API and grabs various bits of info about that steam ID including game bans and stuffs it into a MySQL database.

Some really interesting info popped up.  Pay particular attention to the date the account was created. If it says 1970 then Steam didn't return a creation date. Many accounts are pretty new. The other thing to take a look at is 'last logoff.'  I'm not positive of what this date/time represents but I'm going to guess it's the last time the Steam client was shut down. No info on when the last time it was started is available.

And surprise... many of the names are Chinese. And I think I saw some Japanese and Korean names.  A lot of the names... as you'd expect are simply 123.

http://www.twistedvoid.com/the-atlas-public-stockade/

Take note, I ran this earlier today so that data is cached until the next time I run it.  For now, I have no real plans to do anything with this unless you guys would like to have this in a more permanent home.

Edited by Jean Lafitte
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Whats up with a few of them showing no game bans, or days since last ban being greater than 90 days, which would preclude that ban being from Atlas?

Glitch in the system, overturned, or weren't actually banned - just their ID put on the list?

The other thing I'd be curious about, but am far too lazy to do, would be to create another account with all those IDs on the friends list, and see if, and how many are playing Atlas now - or wasn't there a site that you could track people by their steam id, and see which grid they were in?

Edited by MeatSammich

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5 minutes ago, MeatSammich said:

Whats up with a few of them showing no game bans, or days since last ban being greater than 90 days, which would preclude that ban being from Atlas?

Glitch in the system, overturned, or weren't actually banned - just their ID put on the list?

Not sure.  The Steam API describes it this way:

  • NumberOfGameBans (int) Number of bans in games, this includes CS:GO Overwatch bans.

Because Grapeshot publishes the list of steam ID's that are banned, it may be a case of them not adding those bans to Steam accounts and relying on the list instead, which is why they may not be showing up.

Also, BattleEye keeps its own list of bans which it doesn't make public.  Whether it adds those bans to the Steam ID, I have no idea.

Edited by Jean Lafitte

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1 minute ago, Harryplopper said:

Yeah keep it up. Its nice to see who action is being taken against. It would even be better is there was the cause for the ban. 

Well, if I do set this up in a more permanent fashion, one of the things I want to do is run a 'chron' job every night to grab the latest list.  By doing that, it could track the number of bans per day.  If they ever expand that list to more than ID numbers, say a .csv with other info like date and reason, then yea, that would be easy to incorporate.

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My account was banned for talking shit to a cheater who then didn't get banned. Pretty lame

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I scrolled through them and saw at least one NSFW photo as a profile picture. So may be best to not include that if they do this but otherwise looks good. Nice work. Interesting to see how many accounts were made and banned within a few days to a week. 

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5 hours ago, Thor Ragnarock said:

I scrolled through them and saw at least one NSFW photo as a profile picture. So may be best to not include that if they do this but otherwise looks good. Nice work. Interesting to see how many accounts were made and banned within a few days to a week. 

Yep, I saw that too. All of those images are provided by the Steam API. It appears Steam doesn't police that.

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If it is good enough for steam its good enough for us. No need for all the overly political correctness.

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Jean, some fantastic work. I was having a scroll down the list and spotted that two of the accounts have the same image. Any way you can do an MD5 or similar hash of their profile images and then create a "Linked account" part that names those who have used the same profile picture (excluding the default steam account picture ofc)

 

 

Anyway, love the site 🙂

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6 hours ago, Pizik said:

Jean, some fantastic work. I was having a scroll down the list and spotted that two of the accounts have the same image. Any way you can do an MD5 or similar hash of their profile images and then create a "Linked account" part that names those who have used the same profile picture (excluding the default steam account picture ofc)

Anyway, love the site 🙂

Thanks.  Ok, problems I see: First, there's no guarantee that a player using one image is the same as another person who's using the same image.  Secondly, the Steam API only provides links to the images which is what you see on the site. In order to hash them, the script would have to physically download them.  And since they can be changed by the user, that means the script would have to download them every single time it runs.  There is a small image that can be retrieved but even then, downloading 500+ images would likely cause the script to go past the time limits set by the host and crash unfinished.

Good idea, don't seem practical from the code side of things.

Edited by Jean Lafitte

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Fair enough, I did zero investigation into how practical it was 🙂
 

Thank you for thinking about it for me 😛 

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