HKMP moderation tools

A new version for HKMP has been released: v2.0.3, which aims to add moderation tools to servers and fix API and internal bugs. In this post, I'll go over some details behind these changes and bug fixes.

For some time now, one of the admins on the HKMP Discord server (DwarfWoot) has been graciously hosting public servers for everyone to use. This provided an amazing opportunity for players to hop on and play with their friends or find new companions to play with. What I didn't immediately realize however is that with the introduction of a chat window that things would quickly take a turn for the worse. People started logging on with offensive usernames and started using wildly inappropriate language in the chat. In hindsight, this was a big oversight on my part, because HKMP (up until this point) did not have any moderation tools to deal with these kinds of issues. Version 2.0.3 of HKMP addresses these issues by introducing kicking and banning commands.

As talked about in one of the previous posts, HKMP has an authorization/authentication system. This allows only authorized users to execute these "kick" and "ban" commands. Issuing the "kick" command will simply disconnect a given user from the server and will allow them to reconnect immediately. Issuing a "ban", however, will blacklist the authentication key of the user, which prevents them from reconnecting with it. Additionally, the "banip" command will blacklist a user's IP address, which prevents them from reconnecting even with a new authentication key if on the same IP address. These tools should help keep the public servers clean from users with malicious intent.

Unfortunately, this update is again incompatible with previous versions and this showed when updating the public servers. Before updating them, I used the "announce" command to send a message to the online players, informing them that the server would be updating and that they should update the HKMP mod as well if they wanted to reconnect. I don't think a lot of players saw the message given that, once the server was back online, a lot of players failed to reconnect due to a version mismatch. This is partially my fault, as the networking protocol of HKMP does not provide any information about which version the server or client is using. So players would get stuck on reconnecting until they decided to give up.

Progress has been a bit slow because I'm busy with other stuff at the moment. Sadly, this is the end of the post and I don't have any early access content to provide. What I want to do still is see whether you, my Patrons, are interested in having a private server. This server could run the HKMP Tag game mode for example, or other addons in the future as early access before they are released. There aren't a lot of you, so it might not be used, but if you are interested please send a message in Discord or directly on Patreon. As always, if you have other questions or remarks feel free to also send a message in Discord or directly on Patreon.