Part Deux...

..will explain in detail what has been happening behind the scenes, the threats Syraid has made to his own mods about speaking about this situation, etc etc. All to save face, rather than do the right thing.

I will write it up and post if it comes to it.

Edit: I have been un-frozen although I can argue that I should not have been frozen in the first place for asking for updates on tickets. Due to not being online tonight I will have to continue to chase a resolution to those tickets tomorrow, so the dodgy freeze may return!

Edit2: The details of what happened will now not be published. Although I was given many punishments and had to force the senior mod to take action, action was finally taken. Posting the details of what happened would be embarrassing for that party and such, serves no purpose now.

Maybe in a years time if I receive a FOI/Freedom Of Information request...

What has been happening recently - Part 1

For the last week or so I have been pretty quiet in Syrnia, waiting for nature to take its course. Instead it has shown how useless the senior mods are. Here is what has been happening...

For a long time, Mod Maggie has been abusing her position as a mod. Not only have many players noticed it, many mods have too. It is a long standing joke about Maggie punishing players who argue with her clannies in Fangz, while at the same time her clannies get away mostly without any punishment.

Lets be clear here, Maggie may be nice to have a chat with, this is not being questioned, its the bent and biased actions she takes as a mod.

There had been a few suspect decisions on me lately and I kicked up a fuss about it. What I didn't expect was for many mods to go out of their way to contact me to tell me that indeed Maggie has been punishing me wrongly (for stuff that broke no rules) and had been making bad mod decisions for quite some time before, not just with me. It appears many mods believe Maggie should not be modding due to her biased bent decisions.

So this was great I thought, Maggies bad modding can't be questioned. With my mod wife on holiday when all this kicked off, the timing was perfect as she could not be blamed for telling me anything that these mods told me. What was even better, I was told that a number of mods were requesting to speak to most senior mod Syraid when he returned from a break, to tell him about what Maggie was doing and how they thought it was wrong. There was also talks of a strike if he didn't do anything.

Syraid spoke to me and said he would look into it and he asked me to not reply to the many tickets I had open about the situation while he dealt with it. He asked me to give him 5 days to a week.

8 Days later it appears absolutely nothing had been done. I started replying to the tickets, which were valid tickets so Syraid froze me.

So the question is, why had Syraid not dealt with/sacked Maggie when her mistakes and bad modding is documented and many mods are telling him they do not want to work with Maggie? I will list the possible reasons in the next post...most don't look good for Syraid though...

How Syrnia was knocked offline

We was told it was a DDoS attack that caused Syrnia to go down. In fact this was not correct, technically it was a simple DoS attack. What is the difference?

A DDoS is a Distributed Denial of Service which means many computers (Zombies) and their connections are used to flood a server and cause its service to be unusable. In most case the service is the webserver but it is not limited to this. The main point is the Distributed part which means many hacked computers take part. This is not limited to just exhausting all the servers bandwidth.

So a denial of service can be caused with just one computer, making it just a DoS.

So how was Syrnia knocked offline? With a simple Perl script made of up only a few lines of code, only one of those lines really needed. Someone on dialup could have done this.

Syrnia was running a vulnerable version of Lighttp daemon at the time.

The Lighttpd Server 1.4.23 Remote Denial of Service Exploit runs if you have Perl installed, its as simple as copying the code to notepad and typing: Perl nice.pl www.syrnia.com 80

Four words and Syrnia instantly went offline. No botnets needed, just one person on one pc.

How to cheat like PvP

How to cheat like PvP

1) Become good friends with a mod like Maggie
2) Lag players out by dropping lots of items on the floor in the outlands
3) Kill players while they are lagged out at that location and cannot fight back
4) Get Maggie and her mod friends delete the posts where players have said they saw you cheating and mute anyone who mentions it in chat. Cover it up basically.

If you don't have a mod friend like Maggie who can protect you:

1) Get a friend to carry as many different useless/cheap items as they can into the outlands, knowing you are going to kill them
2) Remember to organise this outside of the game, via MSN so mods cannot read the conversation by looking at your whispers, clan chat or messages.
3) Kill your friend and leave all the items on the floor.
4) Wait until someone comes along and lags due to all the items.
5) Kill them
6) Enjoy the dead players items

The mods let PvP get away with, you can do it and get away with it too by following the above guide.

The latest silencing

Support - view a ticket Logged in as Jop. Back to overview Topic Forum -> Feedback -> Reply to M2H's post Category Forum Username/Email Jop. Last update 2009-10-17 17:25 Status Solved Replies in-game message only This message has been marked as solved by either you, or a moderator. To continue this ticket add a new message and clarify the problem. 2009-10-17 17:25 Senior Moderator Your punishment was fair and it will remain. Closing this ticket. 2009-10-17 17:23 Jop How many times do I have to tell you, I did not discuss punishments in my post!! That is why I am complaining that the forum ban is wrong, as I discussed NO punishments. You have assumed from previous correspondance that I would liek to see punishment handed out, but I have said nothign regarding this in the forum posts that resulted in the banning. This decision needs to be reversed. 2009-10-17 17:20 Senior Moderator Sorry Jop, your forum ban will not be removed. M2H gave permission to discuss about the "bug" itself and it is welcome, thus your post on the appropriate thread is still there. Discussing about punishing players is unacceptable and that is the reason for your warning and ban. 2009-10-17 17:19 Jop Please deal with this, no rules were broken and permission was granteds to talk about this issue by M2H in his announcement. Therefore the forum ban is not valid and should be reversed. 2009-10-17 17:18 Senior Moderator If you have information on how to prove that some players were aware that they were abusing a bug, please send a ticket to the multi/cheat department. The forum is not the place to discuss this. Thank you, Forum department team 2009-10-17 17:09 Jop M2H said this was ok to discuss. Therefore my post should not be deleted and I should not be forum banned. 2009-10-17 17:08 Jop I mentioned nothing about punishments. I merely pointed out that there would be some evidence to the contrary of what was beleived. 2009-10-17 17:04 Senior Moderator You insisted on finding evidence to punish those players. This has been discussed for a long time and it's over. You were warned not to continue, unfortunately you decided to go ahead. 2009-10-17 17:02 Jop I can't read my post now but im sure that I did not discuss punishments. Can you please show me what punishments I discussed? As for you now mentioning exploits, it seems liek you are making this up as you go along. 2009-10-17 16:58 Senior Moderator You were discussing punishments/exploits. 2009-10-17 16:54 Jop There was no discussion about punishments in my post. It simple explained some info that M2H was not aware of. M2H said it could be discussed, why did you delete my thread? 2009-10-17 16:47 Senior Moderator Dear Jop, Please read the announcement. No more discussions about punishments regarding this issue. Please do not pursue this any longer or you'll be severely punished. Forum department team You can not add any more messages as this ticket has been locked.

Another thread gone and punishment wrongly handed out

Yup, the mod (or mods) who are actively stalking and punishing players unfairly are at it again.

The cover up continues, the unmasking of their abuses of power continues.

You can see the forum thread which was deleted and 3 day forum ban handed out for here.

Notice it did not break ANY rules.

All it did was answer a question a mod asked in a mod edit on a forum they locked. I guess they didn't like the fact I could answer it.

Mod feedback

This was posted on forums but magicly dissapeared:

Would like to get an opionion on something and maybe at the same time question how well modding is working. The feedback forum I belive is the correct place for this.

Out of the 3 lines below, which one do you see as the worst?

[2]14:00 brogs: I heard Raid was Qwe's father is that true?

(Mod)SYRAID[Pond]: You're an idiot (from me personally obviously not as a mod)

[2] 14:04 Jop[~X~]: pedro has one, im sure one of your friends can lag him out and kill him in the ol's on his return

Brogs was Muted, forum banned and jailed for that exact comment.

Jop (myself), was muted for an hour for my comment above.

Syraid got no punishment, until repeated tickets from multiple players and then he got a warning.

So do you think the punishment fits?

My own opinion is that there is something very wrong here that needs fixing. It seems that mods have just silenced people for their other mod friends.

P.s:. This is a seperate issue than the mods letting their friends get away with cheating in the ol's (that led to me getting a 24 hour jailing). So we should keep on topic :P

Edit: I have since been forum banned for 35 hours and the forum post deleted, along with all the replies which agreed that there is something wrong with the above type of modding.

If you feel that the modding is getting unfair, the best way is for everyone to send M2H a quick email at support@syrnia.com to let him know.