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Author: Constitution
Description: Forwards team chat and private messages between players to observer admins
Min Version: 2.0.9

This plugin accomplishes the above behavior. All team chat and any private messages that are not from or to an admin are forwarded to all observer admins. Rather simple and straightforward.

Currently there is a problem with the source code (at least my copy, hehe) in that messages sent with "/msg <player> <message>" do not trigger a bz_eChatMessageEvent. Rather than making the plugin work around this, I'm working on creating a patch that will address this issue. Stay tuned.

EDIT: patch completed, if a dev would be so kind as to look into it... http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.ph ... tid=303248

EDIT AGAIN: forgot to mention, my .so Mac binary is for Intel Macs only. I'll get a PPC version up if I can, but no promises.

if it was only team chat it would be ok imo. having access to PMs sounds like infringing people's privacy though. people should be able to chat among themselves without someone listening to them in the meantime just because they have admin powers. there are still logs which can be looked at afterwards if someone complains someone has been misusing PM in any way. i'm assuming at least the server owner should have access to all logs by default.

Yea, I agree. Private messages should stay private.

This is a good idea though. I've come across many incidents where someone has reported someone cussing via Team Speak. This will help remove those players as it happens

Nice Const.

There have been several occasions when I've heard complaints about nasty comments via PM, and it usually comes down to on person's word against another. This certainly would help, but I'm not sure I want to see everyone's chat messages.

Best in my mind would be a way for admins other than the server owner to be able to access the chat logs without listening in on every conversation.

Grace F wrote:Yea, I agree. Private messages should stay private.

They never were.

Grace F wrote:This is a good idea though. I've come across many incidents where someone has reported someone cussing via Team Speak. This will help remove those players as it happens

Nice Const.

What does this have to do with teamspeak?

CannonBallGuy wrote:

Grace F wrote:This is a good idea though. I've come across many incidents where someone has reported someone cussing via Team Speak. This will help remove those players as it happens

Nice Const.

What does this have to do with teamspeak?

Err... uhhh?

In-game teamspeak... not the audio client...

Logs are nice for seeing a conversation after the fact. However, monitoring chat in real-time allows the administrator to properly warn someone to stop. It also allows them to see more of the context of the situation (you can see if someone was swearing at a TK for instance). The server logs don't show everything that may be needed to paint a complete picture of the situation.

At one point, I was going to release a plugin that did exactly this. However, I was urged by a few other players not to release it because of possible abuse by the kiddie server admins.

Constitution, bring it on.
If somebody thinks this is too big brother, put a message in the startup server message that says "WARNING: Private Messages and Team Messages are logged AND monitored".

I already monitor the private messages and team chats in real time but this gives the our admins and cops the ability as well. Less work for me.

Any hope of getting it to work under macOSX?

We haven't had great luck getting plugins to work on mwar on my server.
Tadd

big brother? they must not know that most servers log all chat, and i happen to log everything. if they pick their nose on my server, i'll know.

as to privacy, PM's arent that secure over the internet. if you have sensitive info to send, use a more secure method, possibly a PPtP tunnel or such.

It appears to me that the bzfs console treats /password commands the same as any chat message. Is there any possibility that passwords would be compromised with this plugin?

Otherwise, I agree that people simply have to expect that communications on a server not directly under their own control are open to all sorts of privacy compromises (including pm's on this bb, for example). The best approach is simply not to say anything that you would regret later if it became public.

gnu-sense

Thanks for the thoughts, all. The very fact that messages are only sent to observer admins, in my opinion, restricts the content to those eyes who are already observing the game (watching for infractions of policy, hopefully), so those admins who are there only to enforce policy have the tools they need at their disposal. And anyway, as the original post says, PMs between a player and an admin, or between two admins, are not forwarded anyway. I tried a team-chat-only version for a while on my servers, and it didn't really seem to make the cut. That version is still available in the plugin development forum.

CBG, tadd, etc. do have a point, in that private messages were never really private to begin with. If you only want the chat to be sent to specific admins, then you're quite welcome to modify the plugin to check for a specific perm, rather than just checking to see that the player is an admin (an easy change).

tadd wrote:Any hope of getting it to work under macOSX?

Works out-of-the-box on my system... erm, guess I should have mentioned that my .so binary is for Intel Macs... *goes to fix it* I don't have a PPC mac, so I guess you'll have to compile it... let me know if you need help in this regard.

blast wrote: However, I was urged by a few other players not to release it because of possible abuse by the kiddie server admins.

In my opinion, admins should be worthy of their responsibilities... and if a server owner chooses to be less selective, then yeah, I guess they need to be careful what they allow them to do. Silvercat, for one, was a server with a great selection of cops/admins, as I recall.

gnu-sense wrote:It appears to me that the bzfs console treats /password commands the same as any chat message. Is there any possibility that passwords would be compromised with this plugin?

Slash commands, such as "/password", are not forwarded.

Constitution wrote:Slash commands, such as "/password", are not forwarded.

Well done!

Here is a universal binary made from Constitution's Intel binary and my PPC binary. I tried it, and it seems to work.

*removed*
comment no longer applies

TJ13820 wrote:does anyone have this for PC?
i dislike (hate) configuring plugins

You'll have to compile it for yourself. It's not that hard and there are plenty of threads that explain how to compile plugins.

TJ13820 wrote:does anyone have this for PC?
i dislike (hate) configuring plugins

Sorry, I haven't built this on Windows. If you plan on running a server on Windows, I would recommend learning how to build BZFlag from the source. Once you do, it's very easy to add plugins from what I understand.

im new so plz tell me how to install?

You don't install a plugin. It's just a file you tell bzfs to load. Maybe you should do some research first.

I hope you don't mind Constitution but I know you're busy with a lot stuff, so I updated your plugin to BZFlag 2.4