Bans & the Shared Ban Registry
Ban once. Make it stick when they come back.
A ban is checked the moment a player connects and can match on account id, PunkBuster or EA GUID, address or name — so it holds when they return under a new one. Confirmed bans reach a public registry other communities can read, embed and appeal against.
- The check runs at connect time, not on a timer, so a banned account is caught on the way in rather than noticed later by whoever happened to be watching the roster.
- Scope a ban to one server or to every server you run. Every ban also carries its own matching modes: account id always applies, and on top of it you can switch on Steam ID, EA GUID, PunkBuster GUID, Minecraft UUID, address or name. Name is the weakest of the six and the panel says so rather than letting you find out.
- Address-only bans catch anyone joining from that address, including a first-time visitor who is not in your player list yet — the one case a name-based ban list can never cover.
- Cross-identity enforcement is a per-community switch: a ban on one account can catch the other accounts we have linked to it, and you can turn it off, because how much you trust a link is your call and a noisy ISP makes that call differently.
- It also has a veto nothing else in this category offers. If the banned account and the joining one were ever online at the same moment, one person cannot have been both — so the link is read as a shared-address coincidence, the enforcement is skipped, and the link is left for a human to judge.
- Alongside your own community ban list there is a separate shared registry: public, searchable without an account, and grouped by reason. It is not a copy of every community ban. Metabans staff issue network bans on a community’s request or after review; anti-cheat issues one automatically only for its strongest detection, and staff review every one. Connected Metabans servers enforce those network bans when a player joins.
- Publish it where your players already are: an image card that unfurls in Discord, and an embed that drops into a forum post or a clan site, so your ban list is a trust signal on your own turf rather than only on ours.
- Appeals are public and so is the scoreboard. Anyone can appeal a registry ban after proving they hold the account, and the appeal page publishes the submitted, reviewed, approved and denied counts, the overturn rate, and the average days to a decision. A ban system willing to publish its own overturn rate is one you can argue with.
- A ban you issue stays yours. Nothing here reaches into another community's server to enforce your decision, and nothing reaches into yours — what crosses the boundary is evidence other operators can weigh, not an instruction they must obey.
- Community bans, matching modes, address bans and the connect-time check are free, as is reading the network registry, embedding it and appealing a ban. Your staff can request a network ban from a ban page; Metabans staff decide whether to issue it. Automatic anti-cheat issuance is limited to the strongest detection and every resulting network ban is reviewed by staff.
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