Life of a UT'99 Server Admin
First off a little bit of background since this is my first blog (ever!) I've had a itch to start blogging, but I always end up thinking "what the hell can I write about?" and give up. However, there was something in my inbox this morning that I just had to share, so I thought why not post it here.
Some people may recognise my name from the small amount of skinning that I do (mostly ports), you can see my library on Wincustomize Link I do, however, go by another online nick when ever I play games, that name being [1234]Bedlam - [¹²¾] being the clan. We're lucky enough to have 2 machines sat on a high-speed link to the UK's Internet backbone, these machines are owned, not rented, by a clan member. We run several game servers on these servers (13 in total at the moment), one of which is a UT'99 CTF-Face only server. This CTF server used to be in the 10 ten UT CTF servers NGStats before NGStats died, it still remains a very popular server, despite the fact that the UT'99 scene is slowly dying out. As you can perhaps imagine, we get more than our fair share of cheaters, 'lamers' and generally not very nice players. So nearly all clan members and some non clan members have admin access to kick or ban such players at their own discretion. From time to time these banned players contact us, and we get to hear all sorts of excuses such as "It wasn't me playing at the time, it was my brother", or "I was just testing a bot to see if it works", sometimes they'll admit they got caught, apologies and we'll unban them.
Once in a blue moon, we'll get a gem of an email such as the one I got in my inbox this morning.
(edited the emails addresses and names)
From: "Lee ******"
To: ******@clan1234.comYour Serial Number:
GWF-456-335-BCX
WebSearch - Search and Destroy INC with Authorities.
Subject: Administrators Abuse
Dear Administrator
Congratulations on your success on the Unreal Tournament Online Servers.
Unfortunally, we have came across a term of abuse from one of your administrator operatives.
We have portentionally warned the Administrator operative "Boom" that if he keeps up his act of abuse
towards the user "$p!ke", we will have rights to ban your whole entire website and servers.
Let me Explain a bit about our company.
Our job is to do a big massive search on the Internet, Online games and phones to ban the following items:
l Bad Information
l Abuse or Foul Language
l Sexual Nature
l Administrative Stress Holds.
Your Server that hosts CTF-Face [Clan123/4] has now been rated with "Administrative Stress Holds".
If you refuse to do anything about this issue, will result in total abomination of your website and server.
If you do wish to see to the operative listed above, we would appreciate that you e-mail to this address along with your
serial number posted in the Subject of the current e-mail.
We have gave you an additional 10 days to comply with our demands.
If demands are not met, we will ban your website and servers from the Internet.
Do not try to change your Local IP Address, We have you tracked down on our server which runs 24/7.
If any Rash or Harsh comments have been made back from your self, we will use this abuse towards your rating.
As Part of the authorities, we have the rights to protect the Internet from harmful information and abuse getting out of hand.
We also demand that you unban "$p!ke" from the server listed for future references. We may need to keep an eye on your server
since we have conflicted upon negligence.
Best Regards
Lee ******
Companies Administrator
The wonders of email headers confirm that this email just so happened to be sent from the same IP address as "$p!ke", what are the chances of that...
Also, surely a company the has the power to ban our server from the whole of the Internet (lol!) can afford to not use a hotmail email account. 8/10 for creative writing though.
Anyway, I thought something as good as this had to be shared.