Dealing with Harassment and Abuse

Unfortunately, you will sometimes have troublesome players who are trolling, harassing, or otherwise abusing you or other players. There are a variety of commands for players and admin to deal with them.

Player Commands

Booting Trolls

If someone is causing a ruckus, you can forcibly disconnect them using the boot command.

Note: It is preferable to let the game admin deal with problem players. However, the default Ares configuration allows all approved characters to use the boot command. This helps players protect each other even when an admin is not available.

Reporting Channel Abuse

You can report abusive channel conversations using the channel/report command or the “Report Abuse” menu option in the web portal chat screen. This will create an admin job with the channel recall buffer automatically included.

Monitoring and Reporting Harassing Pages

You can report abusive PM/page conversations using the page/report command or the “Report Abuse” menu option in the web portal chat screen. This will create an admin job with the conversation automatically included.

Reporting Offensive Mails

You can report abusive mail messages using the mail/fwd command or the “Forward” button in the web portal mail screen.

Reporting Offensive Scene Behavior

You can report abusive scene behavior using the scene/report command or the “Report Abuse” menu option in the web portal scene screen. This will create an admin job with the scene log automatically included.

Admin Commands

Booting Trolls

Admins can forcibly disconnect characters using the boot command.

Turning Trolls into Statues

The statue command, similar to Rhost’s FUBAR flag or MUX’s @toad, can deter trolls whose goal is to be sitebanned. When you turn a player into a statue, they will be unable to use any commands at all - not even to quit.

Unapproving Trolls

Most game-altering commands (building, posting to forums, starting scenes) are locked to approved characters by default. This inherently protects you against malicious guests and characters fresh off the login screen. If an already-approved character causes mischief, you can unapprove them to deny them access to these commands. See help manage apps in-game.

Banning Trolls

In the Web Portal banned/suspect sites configuration, you can designate certain IP addresses and/or hostnames as suspect or banned sites.

Banning a site prevents players from logging in at all from that site.

Marking a site as suspect will alert you (via staff job) any time a new character first logs in for the first time from that site.

Blacklisting Proxy Sites

Developed with assistance from Ashen Shugar@RhostMUSH.

If someone is using a proxy server, banning them can be like playing whack-a-mole as they keep switching IPs. An extreme measure is to ban all known proxy sites. This can make things more difficult for a troll, but at a risk of blocking users who are running a proxy server for legitimate reasons. We recommend not enabling this feature unless you’re having serious trouble with a proxy troll.

To ban proxy sites, simply enable the option in the Web Portal banned/suspect sites configuration

Note: There are thousands of proxy IPs on the Internet, and the list is constantly changing. Blocking them all is impossible, but blocking some can sometimes be better than nothing.

Monitoring Trolls

General commands appear in the game log, but private conversations (pages, poses, mail and channels) are not. Ares does not have a ‘SUSPECT’ flag in the way you might be used to from other MU* servers. It is often used for malicious purposes and rarely for good. Players have tools to report page and channel harassment, as explained in the Player Commands section above.