Threads on this board about cheating

[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.

[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

[necromantic]

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.

[Roark]

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.

[kaffeine]

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.

[mforcex]

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.

[RealitY]

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...

[seppypom]

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.

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?

[Daniel]

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.

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.

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.

[asafb]

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

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) 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