PBBans

[-bZ-JaXX]

Not sure if anyone here knows about this or not but it looks like PBBans is not doing very well financially!

I received a email early this morning and it states the following!

"fozzer, on 19 July 2014 - 11:22 AM, said:

Just to keep everyone in the loop.

We have enough donations to keep us afloat for 3 months.

Every month that the donations fall short of the $475 target, that 3 month figure becomes shorter.

If we are unlucky enough to suffer any kind of hardware failure, the 3 month figure will be reduced drastically.

Like I posted earlier, I do not want any of our streaming admin to be able to say that they "had no idea" of how desperate the lack of donations issue is.

To all those that donate on a regular monthly basis.....thanks a lot, we really do appreciate your commitment  :mrgreen:  

With over 15,000 team accounts and over 2,000 streaming servers you would think that we would have no problem in achieving our donations target each month but believe me we do   :sad:  

The biggest threat by far, to the very existence of PBBans is the complacency of the admins that use PPBans services.

Yet another month goes by and yet again a failure to hit the $475 donation target with our worse month to date.

It's geting to the stage now that I will be calling a staff meeting, on the agenda we will be looking at closing the site and putting everything in mothballs until we have enough funds to keep us afloat for at least 6 months.

February 2014 - $370

March 2014 - $369

April 2014 - $351

May 2014 - $398

June 2014 - $381

July 2014 - $336

August 2014 - $266"

 

[-bZ-wakuritz]

Forgive my ignorance, but how important is PBBans?  That isn't a cynical question, either.  If they disappear, what happens?

 

[vetusvir]

is there any one to take their place? pb has always been there to help us stop the hax. 

 

[PROACEX1]

PBBans is a unified list of all subscribing servers in relevant games of detected punkbuster violations. Live-banning features from the global list help prevent hackers from hopping from one PB enabled server to another, forcing them to create new GUIDs before coming back. It is also a community where admins can come together and look at evidence of a player as needed and decide whether he gets put on the global banlist.

If they go down there will be a pretty big delay in updating the server banlist (IE manually updating, MD5Tool, CVAR checks, no live-streaming of the banlist).

Some annoyances that way will occur too. So not the greatest stuff, but it isn't like once we find someone to be cheating and ban anyways after reviewing the evidence.

 

[CR8Z]

They said they would shut the website down, which would pretty much give anybody with prior bans in other PB games a clean slate.

 

[PROACEX1]

tl;dr version ^

 

[-bZ-JaXX]

Agreed. Everyone with prior bans will be cleared. For those who don't know much about ppbans, they have been around the gaming community for over 12 years. Started when Tom clancys rainbow six came out and went into full gear with battlefield Vietnam.

I'm deeply surprised it has lacked the funding. They should make it if you stream and protect you must donate.

 

[willister]

What about GGC? Could they somehow combine in the event of PBB going down? It's too bad that they're in this spot now when they provide the service to so many servers. If each server was contributing even a tiny amount they would be way beyond what they needed monthly.

 

[CR8Z]

There are only so many dollars in any given club.

 

[Drunk]

I received the same email a couple months back. Now remember everyone PB Bans & PunkBuster are two different entities just because PB Bans shuts down doesn't clean every slate only the ones that PB Bans deemed necessary that PunkBuster did not. However, it is bad to see this information considering with my many years of FPS game play I watched as PunkBuster itself turned a blind eye to many cheats and glitches and would not ban a player, but then PB Bans started up and they reviewed much of the same screenshots and other media and banned players that PunkBuster said there wasn't enough evidence to warrant a ban. It will definitely be a sad day when their site goes down.....

 

[SneakySmart]

IDK sounds like it could be some mismanagement also, but I think there hate group is larger than there support group is? I'll see if I can help them out a few cents. :mrgreen:

 

[hankquinlin]

Companies integrate Punkbuster into the games they publish.Why are the gaming companies not contributing to keep Punkbuster  going? While it is true that Punkbuster helps to keep the severs free of hackers, they are also contributing toward the Integrity of the corporations that create the games that we play It seems to me that these companies should be the ones keeping Punkbuster afloat.
 
Sure, the service does help gaming community admins by identifying hackers though their database. However it is very rare to see someone on a server one is playing on, Punkbuster banned, while playing along with you.

 

[willister]

Two different things Hank. Punkbuster is the official service and that's not going anywhere. PBBans is a supplemental service that servers can run and share a streaming ban list with each other. If someone gets banned through PBBans, they'll be banned on all the servers running that service. This is useful because PB can miss things completely or doesn't catch people right away. With the additional service, servers can stay a little cleaner.