Online play, accounts question

[bt]

I play on CXC, today someone created the same name account on a different server (LLD) and killed my streak. Is there a way to avoid this type of stuff happening besides creating an account on each server yourself? And is there a way to communicate to already created account on other server to ask them to change their name, again besides creating even more accounts?

My scoring page (MuCK is a game in question):
http://crawl.akrasiac.org/scoring/players/paperrat.html

[chequers]

Griefers have done this a few times in the past. There's no defence except to pre-register your account on all servers.

[bt]

Hmm, I don't think it was griefing, two games streak isn't worth much, nor does anyone have a reason to, as far as I'm aware. Could be a one-game-try new account, though there are some peculiar things about the morgue for sure - one minute 0.24 game of unarmed MuCK with autoskilling on, it's like a murder mystery almost . Oh well, no biggie, did register on the rest of the servers just in case. Worst comes to worst, will just start a new account entirely.

[Siegurt]

There've been some suggestions on how to handle this in the past (the simplest way is a tag in your .rc that identifies which "combined" score name you want to use, preferably digitally signed if we want to actually prevent people from using it maliciously)

This would actually be a fairly easy thing to write (Maybe would take the better part of an afternoon), but then you'd have to go about changing all the scoring scripts to pay attention to it, and getting everyone who wants to register to do so (And also give them instructions to put the tag in their .rc), plus you'd have to put the registration somewhere, and set up an interface to generate tags, have an interface to pull the mapping of tag->name, and *then* you'd need to protect *that* so people didn't spam your server and take down your service etc.etc.

It's annoying, but certainly possible to do, I just don't think that it's been a widespread enough problem that people have been inclined to do the work.

FWIW sequell has a combined-nick-registration thing that can be used for it's stats, but AFAIK it's not used for scoring.

[Siegurt]

There've been some suggestions on how to handle this in the past (the simplest way is a tag in your .rc that identifies which "combined" score name you want to use, preferably digitally signed if we want to actually prevent people from using it maliciously)

This would actually be a fairly easy thing to write (Maybe would take the better part of an afternoon), but then you'd have to go about changing all the scoring scripts to pay attention to it, and getting everyone who wants to register to do so (And also give them instructions to put the tag in their .rc), plus you'd have to put the registration somewhere, and set up an interface to generate tags, have an interface to pull the mapping of tag->name, and *then* you'd need to protect *that* so people didn't spam your server and take down your service etc.etc.

It's annoying, but certainly possible to do, I just don't think that it's been a widespread enough problem that people have been inclined to do the work.

FWIW sequell has a combined-nick-registration thing that can be used for it's stats, but AFAIK it's not used for scoring.

Actually now that I think about it, you don't actually *need* a service for this, just a program that has internet access (So you could verify the key belonged to a specific user) and a standardized SSL implementation. (Which could theoretically be compiled and run locally) The service providers would just need to verify the digital signature from the public key and wouldn't need to access a centralized server at all. Although that might be beyond the technical capabilities of the typical Windows user (where OpenSSL isn't a standardized service) so an online service would be helpful, even if not required.