Server crash griefing

[Eniac forgets Username]

I was just playing a game of defcon, and an abusive spectator joined named 'Cobra Commander.' He insulted the players for awhile, then said he would shutdown the server. He then spammed chat with a long string of repeating characters and numbers, which looked something like this:

Cobra Commander: 0
Cobra Commander: 1
Cobra Commander: 2
Cobra Commander: 3
Cobra Commander: 4
Cobra Commander: 5
Cobra Commander: 6

until the server started slowing down and eventually crashed. I'd say he was spamming characters for about 3 minutes before the server went down. the characters appeared quickly so it looks like he was using a script to do this. This is the only instance I've seen of someone else crashing a server, but it's very annoying and it seems like this could be fixed easily with some sort of chat limit.


Also, thanks to the Defcon team for producing such a great game! I complained about a lag problem here almost a year ago, and the next patch totally fixed it! I've been a happy player ever since.

[xander]

The only suggestion that I can make is play on Dedcon servers. Dedcons can be configured to stop this kind of chat spam (and most of them are). Also, are you sure that the server crashed, or did the host just leave, causing the server to be shutdown?

xander

[Chimaera]

I assume that this wasn't the 'real' Cobra Commander, as he is a reasonably respected player and is quite high in the league table rankings. Lots of people 'steal' nicknames for various reasons.

[bert_the_turtle]

I'm assuming that, too. The real Cobra is slowly pushing his annoyance level up and even has been recorded as spammer on my servers, but it was not that mindless kind of spam, he simply talked a lot of crap

[Eniac forgets Username]

Yeah, it's very likely Cobra Commander made someone mad and they decided to try to give him a bad reputation by crashing servers. I haven't seen it happen again though, so it's probably not an issue as long as no one abuses it.