Username bans

[Chief-Engineer]

WizDen currently deals with bad usernames by placing an account ban, but since you can easily change usernames now this is not ideal. There are two primary purposes which should be served:

Preemptive bans

In this use case, multiple blacklist regex are defined. Unlike notes and bans, these are likely to be modified frequently, at least in the time around their initial creation, so it may be beneficial to keep that in mind when designing a way to audit the changes. This would also benefit from a whitelist system, where specific usernames are provided that will be permitted even if they match a blacklist regex. Neither the regex blacklist nor the username whitelist strictly require the ability for admins to interact with them in-game, interaction through SS14.Admin is probably ideal.

Reactive bans

In this use case, a player joins with a username that the game admins want to ban, so the specific player's username is blacklisted. This should be possible in-game.

Ban message

The ban message for a username blacklist should probably be configurable, and each blacklist entry should probably have the ability to have a note added to it, especially regex blacklists, but a public per username ban reason is probably not needed. Players that hit a username ban should just be clearly told that their username isn't permitted and they can change it at (link) or appeal at (link).

[benev0]

Should the regex username ban have the functionality to auto extend into a full ban? In cases in witch a regex ban is significant enough for game admins to not want the player on their server in the future; in particular the name containing a slur or other prohibited content that is not expected to be a substring of another word of the server.

[Chief-Engineer]

Should the regex username ban have the functionality to auto extend into a full ban? In cases in witch a regex ban is significant enough for game admins to not want the player on their server in the future; in particular the name containing a slur or other prohibited content that is not expected to be a substring of another word of the server.

I think that'd be a nice feature, but I wouldn't say it's required for the initial implementation. Once #25293 is done then this would be an intrinsic capability of all bans.

I'm also going to answer the question you DMed me on discord here to let other people see it and share their opinions if they feel the need to. You asked if these bans should be separate from existing bans or not. PJB is probably going to be who will review the DB changes so it'd be best to ask them but imo it's fine for username bans to be separate with how our current ban system works. Username bans would primarily be to prevent certain usernames from being used, not to prevent specific people from joining, so I feel like having some separation is appropriate just as it is appropriate for role bans and game bans to be separate. I can think of some cases where we may want to combine username bans with account/ip bans, but I suspect those would be extremely rare. Once #25293 is done, I think we'd want usernames to be a ban target so they would to an extent be merged, but #25293 requires a complete DB restructuring anyway so I don't think it'd save any time to consider the changes that will be necessary for #25293 at the moment