The motion to ban autofire has been passed by a margin of 21-6.

If you are aware of any autofire recordings that you have made, please delete them and/or replace them with new recordings. I would call for immediate deletion where autofiring directly influences the game (particularily in any shooter games), and a gradual replacement of those scores where autofire does not influence the game.

What's the community's feelings on this? Should there be a grace period of sorts?

-- Q.T.Quazar (qan@home.com), January 30, 2000

Answers

I am going through the Track & Field and clones recordings as well as the Hyper Sports and clone recordings. Most of those use RLH and/or autofire. It's really a joke. I am going to give people a few days to delete those recordings themselves. Anything still there in a few days that uses RLH and/or autofire will be zeroed out and the description will be edited to show that RLH and/or autofire was used.

Cheers, Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), January 30, 2000.

Well done, and thank you Ben Jos. Perhaps those scores on T+F, and Hyper Sports can be 'addressed' ?

ALEX

-- Alex Weir (alexweir@indigo.ie), January 30, 2000.

I say you must mail the person if you change their score... since someone might not even know that their score was changed (they only get notified if someone else beats their score, etc...) And we do want to prevent autofire not just ban the ones that are there now. you should also keep a separate database (text file) of recordings that were detected as autofire and adjusted, just in case the users edit the text and edit the score back to being "non-autofire".

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), January 30, 2000.

Yes, I'm keeping a list of the analyses of all the recordings. As for e-mail notifications, the problem is that they happen automatically for uploads, but once we really start getting into deleting autofire recordings, that means that the people who delete them have to send out hundreds, maybe thousands, of e-mails manually. The T&F and Hyper Sports and clones recordings alone would result in a few dozen of e-mails to be sent.

I've come up with a solution that would enable me to delete recordings without having to send out e-mails manually: If I first upload a dummy recording and give it a score that beats the current number one score and then put a description like "This is not a real recording. This is just to notify you that your submission on this game may be deleted shortly for using RLH and/or autofire.", then the automatic e-mail notifications should make people aware. Then I zero out all the recordings in question and edit their descriptions, as well as delete my own dummy recording again.

I think it's a fair compromise to do it this way. After all, I think that since autofire is officially banned now, people should take care of deleting everything that uses it themselves. If they are too lazy to do this (not to mention worse cases like people hoping they can get away with it), then I think I am entitled to be too lazy to manually send them an e-mail...

Cheers, Ben Jos.

-- Ben Jos Walbeehm (walbeehm@walbeehm.com), January 30, 2000.

That's good news! Isn't it Alex... Finally :)

This is the right way to deal with problems like this, or ortherwise nothing will ever happen.

-- Tommi (tiihoto@hotmail.com), January 31, 2000.

Oh! this is sweet! Those who howl at the full moon may sleep peaceful tonight.

Tonight I performed the unfortunate task of removing my 'autofire assisted' #1 starforc recording. I hope to replace it with a legit one in the next month or so. Is it enough just to edit your score down to 0 or is more required.

There are other 'autofire assisted' starforc/starfore/megaforc recordings that need to go as well. How long do we wait before pointing fingers at offending recordings that haven't been removed? I've waited for a long time to see these offensive recordings removed. The only reason I ever used autofire in starforc was because it was the only way to compete with these recordings - autofire in starforc is diabolical.

-- Tim Morrow (tjmorrow@bigpond.com), January 31, 2000.

Finally something is moving on....after months of howling....that makes me really happy !!!

pls Ben Jos...take a minute to clean up all those Star Force and clones scores....thank you.

Cicca

-- Cicca (cicca@writeme.com), January 31, 2000.

PLease tell me how do you test whether the particular inp file was recorded using autofire. Do you have some software to do the test?

-- Aley Keprt (AleyKeprt@bigfoot.com), April 19, 2001.

Yes, it was developed at marp in house, and if you're so carefull about holding contests and security issues of mame (and marp of course is not? with it's autofire detection developed by Skito and slow computer and pause detection software currently developed by Mark Longridge and future-wise by Ben Jos) it's a shame you haven't thought of these issues ahead of time so you could have dealt with them in prior contents... you've been around long enough, since 1992, quite impressive, but your politeness needs work.

-- Chad (churritz@cts.com), April 20, 2001.