Thanks for the post TNT!
Believe me, the auto kicks aren't personal. We'll get something worked out in the future, I'm sure.
It's not like we wanted to do any of this.
I deleted the post lol, but I appreciate the response. I know it isn't personal.
To everyone else, basically FreedomSpy and OpenSpy exist separately. Technically at this very moment in time, I have personally confirmed the more secure and private option is OpenSpy. At this point in time, I can personally, as a normal user, connect to FreedomSpy and actively log every user's ID who connects to it. I can start building a database of users and their IDs. FreedomSpy may also have a unique GS ID structure, which may hinder decoding IPs, but they aren't random. Even though this was something I could personally do on OpenSpy in the past with the same method, it does not work at this time, as they have increased the security. This is no fault of OpenSpy or FreedomSpy, it's an exploit that has existed since it was GameSpy, and they never intended to fix it. Both FreedomSpy and OpenSpy admins will always have the option to track users, and the option to use that data for whatever purpose. At this time, OpenSpy may or my not be logging users. At this time, FreedomSpy is logging users for the purpose of reflecting user data on Snipes website. This isn't terrible, or horrible, and he's not doing it in secret.
Here is a screenshot of being connected to FreedomSpy and it's channels:
Differences I have noticed so far in FreedomSpy are that Snipe has nulled the GameSpy Gamekeys for all titles, which as far as I know is meaningless, as the keys were used in the past to fool the actual GameSpy server into thinking you were connecting from the game of your choice, instead of a IRC program. FreedomSpy allows up to three connections from a single IP at a time. As stated, FreedomSpy also has a unique ID system.
OpenSpy did the right thing in my personal opinion by denying an outside source the ability to scrape user data to be posted on his site. At the same time, I feel that Snipe did the right thing in hosting his own alternative for his site, and openly admitting the data will be used on his site. With that said, Snipe isn't posting IP addresses, just usernames of who has connected. He's done this in the past, and it is a unique feature to his site that is honestly pretty cool.
As for the 'privacy' and 'getting past bans,' generally you have to be a toxic disease in the community to be banned from OpenSpy, and as I've stated, OpenSpy currently offers more privacy, from the admins and as protection from the community. This is proven further by their decision to not let Snipe scrape data. That was an action of privacy protection.
As a mindless suggestion that I have absolutely no knowledge about, nor if it would work, FreedomSpy connecting to OpenSpy rooms after the lobby may be a way to separate it entirely. If I'm correct, and I may not be, the rooms being displayed in the FreedomSpy lobby are from 'thugpro.ms9.openspy.net' port 28910. I'm not sure if this could be used or not, but perhaps OpenSpy could block the FreedomSpy IP from accessing that data, which would force Snipe to take it a step farther and have separate rooms from OpenSpy users, forcing all FreedomSpy users to edit their game or hosts file, meaning any new Thug Pro user will go through OpenSpy first, never having contact with FreedomSpy users.
Even if possible, that doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to do, but to enforce bans it may be necessary.
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Full privacy disclosure (without mentioning any names). Nothing is as private as you ever think. Take it from me. For a very long time I logged all the THPS GameSpy traffic, and I wasn't the only one. There was even an incident one time that led to me and someone else logging all OpenSpy traffic for one day when it was in it's infancy. I wasn't the operator or admin of either, that was as a user. In both cases the operators or admins were unaware of what I was doing. At the end of the day, you can't focus on this and forget that Thug Pro is worth having your IP scraped.
At least if you choose FreedomSpy, or choose to remain with OpenSpy, it's because you're playing Thug Pro, and isn't that what this season is really about?
Merry Christmas THPS family
