Threads on this board about cheating

About a week ago, a few topics on cheating surfaced, and the admins locked them all, which IMO was a mistake. If you shield us from cheating, you are limiting us on knowledge to help stop cheating. I've seen a few times people ask innocent questions, and then others learn to cheat off them, but since the word cheat was explicitly stated, the thread stays open. So basically, heres what happens.... the admins let the "innocent" people who hint at ways to cheat run free, and anyone who wants to talk about stopping cheaters gets his thread locked. Here's a simple reason why we should be able to discuss cheating here, I DO NOT MEAN SUPPORT IT OR PROMOTE IN ANY WAY, I mean we should be able to discuss how to stop cheating. Easy example is ghost leeching... if we talked about it here at FST, people would know to look for IPs of people not on torrents to get them banned. Instead, we have innocent people post things like can i download a file i uploaded, when we should have made it clear somewhere that this is cheating. Sigh. Admins, seriously, people need to talk about taboo subjects, or this community is going to go way more downhill.

Mods here would probably need to monitor the cheat threads more than others. There will always be someone who posts how to cheat and some other noob will do it.
This is similar to what happened with the whole israel thingee - someone posted on a popular forum how to cheat and everyone followed. Then again, cheating was a newish thing back then and people might be more aware of it now.

/shrugs

It's a slippery slope you're climbing mforcex. Although I agree with you that information should be shared freely without censorship, in this case it may do more harm than good.

You're completely right, in order to stop cheating you have to know how to cheat. You have to be very informed on the subject to know what to look for. And what this means is that by discussing cheat prevention we will be teaching people to cheat. It's the same with viruses and antivirus protection. The bottom line is that the average user can't do much, if anything, to prevent cheaters. The Admin/Sysops are the ones who can fight the war, not us. And I'm willing to bet my lvl 9s that any Admin/Sysop with a decent site already knows tons more than the average user on the subject.

You end up teaching the ignorant how to cheat, and adding temptation for nothing. Also the Admin/Sysops don't gain anything out of the discussion.

I agree that this forum is worse for not allowing such threads. When I want to read about cheating techniques, I simply go to one of the many forums that allow their members to talk about it.

This topic gets censored because when someone asks something related to cheating, it looks like he's trying to get as much info in order to learn how to do it, and like necromantic said, the discussion doesn't provide much to the forum, as the poster only gets flamed and comments like "it's obvious what you're asking this for" and such. I think we should be able to discuss it freely but on the other side, it just gives people wrong ideas i think.

Any decent sized site, I'll go with 8,000 members, has only maybe 10-15 admins at most, and these admins can't monitor every single user, every single torrent. It is just way too time consuming. Larger sites, beyond 8,000, and cheating is basically caught using scripts only. The community policing itself is NECESSARY. I can't stress enough how necessary it is. Sure admins can do more than users, since they have log access and whatnot, but that doesn't mean users can't help stop cheating.

There are lots of places on the web that will teach you how to cheat as Roark said... we don't need to learn techniques here. I'm suggesting that we have something like this: Ghost Leeching: You can help your community by telling admins about extra IPs leeching a torrent off you. Of course more detail is needed than that, but we will not share how to ghost leech, just how to stop it.

I think this is a really good idea: We make a sticky called How to help your private site community stop cheaters
In this sticky we outline various ways to help prevent cheating, but we do not share how the cheat is done. People are not allowed to ask any questions as to how the cheat can be done. Mods can then edit out anyone who breaks that rule.

Also, we can discuss methods of how to make cheat catching scripts, code them maybe, and help sites implement them into their own website. Currently, no website has a full proof cheat catching script. Oink bans everyone, cheaters and non cheaters, and then sites like TL basically don't have a script. Point being, we must be active and help.

Not aware of what threads have been locked recently or why so cant comment on that. Most general chat should be fine though threads naming cheat clients or linking to them or sites where to discuss or get them are edited or removed. As some mentioned there are sites that go into detail and we simply dont want part of it and arent going to generate any traffic for them. Weve even added filters to remove names and urls regarding this. Its a fine line and the mods have to make the call when reading those posts. If your post isnt naming cheat clients or linking to them then it should be fine. Though we deffinatly wont be part to leaving links and how tos on this site...

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Originally Posted by mforcex

About a week ago, a few topics on cheating surfaced, and the admins locked them all, which IMO was a mistake. If you shield us from cheating, you are limiting us on knowledge to help stop cheating. I've seen a few times people ask innocent questions, and then others learn to cheat off them, but since the word cheat was explicitly stated, the thread stays open. So basically, heres what happens.... the admins let the "innocent" people who hint at ways to cheat run free, and anyone who wants to talk about stopping cheaters gets his thread locked. Here's a simple reason why we should be able to discuss cheating here, I DO NOT MEAN SUPPORT IT OR PROMOTE IN ANY WAY, I mean we should be able to discuss how to stop cheating. Easy example is ghost leeching... if we talked about it here at FST, people would know to look for IPs of people not on torrents to get them banned. Instead, we have innocent people post things like can i download a file i uploaded, when we should have made it clear somewhere that this is cheating. Sigh. Admins, seriously, people need to talk about taboo subjects, or this community is going to go way more downhill.

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I am curious how you think that YOU are going to "Stop Cheating"?

And i am not trying to be Adversarial or anything. And i don't have an option for or against talking about it. But how is talking about it going to stop it?

Applying the most basic scripts will catch people who cheat for extreme amounts of upload data only (or those cheaters who are incredibly stupid), because everything else can be reached naturally. What is left are complex scripts that work but may also produce false recognitions.

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Originally Posted by mforcex

Larger sites, beyond 8,000, and cheating is basically caught using scripts only. The community policing itself is NECESSARY. I can't stress enough how necessary it is. Sure admins can do more than users, since they have log access and whatnot, but that doesn't mean users can't help stop cheating.

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While it's a good idea to let the community help with catching cheaters, they can only do that when they have enough data available to recognize suspicious behavior. For a user to reasonably catch a cheater one should have access to transfer-details of each user and torrent. I don't mind admins and mods having access to this at all, but I don't want my account to be exploitable by every other user as he wishes. Some part of the reason is a simple request for privacy while the missing security (hey, if everyone can watch my detailled download and upload stats, so can any member of an organization preventing copyright protected filesharing) plays a part as well.

The problem with cheating is essentially the way the bittorrent network is built. By having the tracker only as a very passive resource outside the network, the connection with the client and its transmitted data is not verifiable at first. I don't presume to know how anti-cheater scripts like the one at Oink works but it's basically possible to catch a very large part of all cheaters. The script or program who has to process so much data will need to search through endless amounts of logfiles. That takes up not only space but also server resources - a 20k user tracker might just have 50-150k datasets per hour that can be used for tracking cheaters. That's no small amount and considering that some trackers are operating on the limit of their servers, this takes CPU-time which is simply not available.


In all reality, it probably won't be the amazing cheat-scripts that take up too much resources and it won't be a distrusting community that is likely to report any guy with a good ratio as a cheater. I absolutely don't condone cheaters as they're scum, but I have to admit that they aren't harmful to the tracker in small doses. For a tracker to be healthy, there is probably no need for an uber-strict anti-cheating-script as long as the amount of cheaters stays reasonably small.
Something that would REALLY stop cheating altogether would be a mandatory bittorrent client that transmits some extras between users and the tracker. The idea of a bt-client for private trackers has been mentioned in the halite-thread IIRC - if a development in this direction is possible, this is a must-have feature.

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Originally Posted by Mareko

Mods here would probably need to monitor the cheat threads more than others. There will always be someone who posts how to cheat and some other noob will do it.
This is similar to what happened with the whole israel thingee - someone posted on a popular forum how to cheat and everyone followed. Then again, cheating was a newish thing back then and people might be more aware of it now.

/shrugs

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just for u to know...
this is rep going on with isrealis
dont tell me its not true:
everytime a user see an isreali user -there is thought going on about cheating----- it's wrong and not nice..
not every isreali cheats!
from a large community like TL there is i think 5 % isreali and lets say 25 % of them cheating...
they are a little peice of the community(1.25 %),
and believe me there's much more cheaters and ratio fakers outside of isreal...
excpet ISC there is a lot off people who dont cheats
now what trackers do??
blocks them all including the cheaters(BITME 'BITMETV LM TB and countless others) even the ones who dont cheat =/
and about the isreali's who do cheat
do u know the max connection on isreal?
10 Mbit and thats only for company's
all users have between 1.5 and 5 Mbit
and there are people who buy seedboxes (the ones who want to pay 2 download and upload faster )
i can bet on it that u didnt know that...
so the upload speed on isreal its max 70 kb/s
but in every other country they have above 200 kb/s
u can say were screwed and the ones who do cheat dont have a choise,
my max upload is 14 kb/s (u can laught:cry:) i dont cheat' dunno how,

i believe u now know at least whats going on in isreal about speeds

i'm sick of people who think all isreali's users are cheaters...
find someone else to blame!... GOD!

good day

Word

It's true that Israeli users do have a bad name but I just wanted to say that I've been given (for nothing :)) some very nice invites by two friendly Israelis so they can't be all bad.

i never knew about ghost leeching until now .. lol

Seppypom, I've given a few trackers the IPs/account names of cheaters. I'd say roughly 5 total since the start of the year. Sure 5 isn't much, but I'm one person, imagine if we had 20 me's... or 50.

ttetile - Maybe you never heard the phrase, but we didn't teach you how here, and we are only going to share how to catch you if you do it.

Daniel - Very good points. Users IMO are just hindered, not helpless here. There is enough data available to them to help stop certain types of cheating.

On a side note, does anyone else here, besides me, see the thread titled is it bad to download your own torrent, going down a very slippery slope?

double post :(

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Originally Posted by mforcex

ttetile - maybe you never heard the phrase, but we didn't teach you how here, and we are only going to share how to catch you if you do it.

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you need to know how to do it before you can prevent it .. anyway i googled that term and found a lot about it .. maybe thats why admins and mods kept deleting the threads related to cheating ..

anyone who know about google can find out about cheating and all the related links... i don't think censoring is the right thing to do. but its just my opinion.

regarding the cheating threads issue

I think the mods did the right thing

mforcex , you wanna discuss cheating, then there are plenty of cheat forums for you . you'll read there anything you want : when, how, how many, why etc.
don't try to make from fst users (many of them are bt n00bs) experienced cheater hunters . Catching cheaters is not that hard , but also not that simple , leave it to staffers , cause a small mistake - and a very good account of a good user can be disabled (together with all other accounts of this person on other trackers) . Not mentioning the fact that sometimes even experienced admins may do mistakes in such cases .

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Originally Posted by asafb

do u know the max connection on isreal?
10 Mbit and thats only for company's
all users have between 1.5 and 5 Mbit
and there are people who buy seedboxes (the ones who want to pay 2 download and upload faster )
i can bet on it that u didnt know that...
so the upload speed on isreal its max 70 kb/s
but in every other country they have above 200 kb/s

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asafb , you are fantastastic :D
1)The max connection in Israel is above 10Mbit . Only in university I've got 2.7MB/s (While the max @10Mbit is 1.2MB/s) . And yes, most of the traffic went outside of Israel.
2)You bet he doesn't know that Israelis get seedboxes . You are wrong.
3)The max upload in Israel AT HOME is 1Mbit (128KB/s) , though it's expensive . But you can get the 64 KB/s instead of yours 14KB/s by adding a poor amount of 6-7 bucks a month , that's all .
4)No, not every other country has upload speed above 200 KB/s .

Cheaters suck.

Also i think most sites are starting to see that close to half of all Israel members do cheat and have been cought in the act. As i type this i have 38 of them that will be banned this week all for cheating and caught by 2 different scripts and spoted by some members that turned there dumb ass in.

Now every site has cheaters and every country has cheaters, but the funny thing is that most of the people we catch are from the middle east and i would say about 70% of them are from middle east. Which is sad. Some of my staff are bitching hard core to start banning everyone from the middle east and most proxy servers/ip's as they are sick of dealing with them.


another thing is about 60% of the middle east members have also been banned for account trading again not sure why its so high with in the middle east. I have heard its because they are downloading stuff and selling it on the streets for cash and not giving to shits about anyone else. Once they get banned or rights to download disable they start trading and looking for other accounts untill they are busted also. just somethign i have read and been told by other middle east users.





Wild

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Originally Posted by wildbytes

Cheaters suck.

Also i think most sites are starting to see that close to half of all Israel members do cheat and have been cought in the act. As i type this i have 38 of them that will be banned this week all for cheating and caught by 2 different scripts and spoted by some members that turned there dumb ass in.

Now every site has cheaters and every country has cheaters, but the funny thing is that most of the people we catch are from the middle east and i would say about 70% of them are from middle east. Which is sad. Some of my staff are bitching hard core to start banning everyone from the middle east and most proxy servers/ip's as they are sick of dealing with them.


another thing is about 60% of the middle east members have also been banned for account trading again not sure why its so high with in the middle east. I have heard its because they are downloading stuff and selling it on the streets for cash and not giving to shits about anyone else. Once they get banned or rights to download disable they start trading and looking for other accounts untill they are busted also. just somethign i have read and been told by other middle east users.





Wild

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I think every site should ban the whole country, they are a leech on the torrent community..

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Originally Posted by wildbytes

Cheaters suck.

Also i think most sites are starting to see that close to half of all Israel members do cheat and have been cought in the act. As i type this i have 38 of them that will be banned this week all for cheating and caught by 2 different scripts and spoted by some members that turned there dumb ass in.

Now every site has cheaters and every country has cheaters, but the funny thing is that most of the people we catch are from the middle east and i would say about 70% of them are from middle east. Which is sad. Some of my staff are bitching hard core to start banning everyone from the middle east and most proxy servers/ip's as they are sick of dealing with them.


another thing is about 60% of the middle east members have also been banned for account trading again not sure why its so high with in the middle east. I have heard its because they are downloading stuff and selling it on the streets for cash and not giving to shits about anyone else. Once they get banned or rights to download disable they start trading and looking for other accounts untill they are busted also. just somethign i have read and been told by other middle east users.





Wild

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Nice reading wild :turned:

yes cheaters suck,
and yes there are few users in my country "egypt" cheats but those are not the majority
many of us in egypt don't have upload rate more than 64 kb/sec ; in fact, most of us using 20 or less but this isn't an excuse .
my point is don't generalize the issue saying "many of them come from middle east"
maybe they come from a country or two but not from all middle east
still in middle east ; people who value the aspect of sharing and high morals

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Originally Posted by wildbytes

Cheaters suck.

Also i think most sites are starting to see that close to half of all Israel members do cheat and have been cought in the act. As i type this i have 38 of them that will be banned this week all for cheating and caught by 2 different scripts and spoted by some members that turned there dumb ass in.

Now every site has cheaters and every country has cheaters, but the funny thing is that most of the people we catch are from the middle east and i would say about 70% of them are from middle east. Which is sad. Some of my staff are bitching hard core to start banning everyone from the middle east and most proxy servers/ip's as they are sick of dealing with them.


another thing is about 60% of the middle east members have also been banned for account trading again not sure why its so high with in the middle east. I have heard its because they are downloading stuff and selling it on the streets for cash and not giving to shits about anyone else. Once they get banned or rights to download disable they start trading and looking for other accounts untill they are busted also. just somethign i have read and been told by other middle east users.





Wild

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Fact :D

i'm from middle east but not a cheater :P