How can we help to improve SMAC?

[borzaka]

Ideas:

• Send demos? Yesterday I had an obvious cheater on one of my CS:GO servers, but SMAC didn't detected any of his shoots. I have a complete demo about that cheater. Would it help if I send it over? I have demos from other cheaters caught and banned by SMAC as well.

• Join SMACBans There is this site SMACBans.com, which has a global banlist from cheaters caught by SMAC. And if someone tries to join your server, and he is banned previously from one of their trusted servers, he will be kicked from your server as well. Unfortunatelly the SmacBans-Block plugin repo is archived, and not maintained anymore. I was able to compile it, and make it work, but I'am afraid the list might be outdated, but the site has updates, and it looks like it's alive, and still has bans with CS:GO. I would happily join the trusted servers and contribute to the cheaters list caught by SMAC running on my community servers. A few messages from the SmacBans-Block plugin, proving that it works for me:

  L 09/23/2019 - 14:05:49: ID: STEAM_0:1:48525378 (Eye Test Violation) is on the SMACBANS global banlist
  L 09/23/2019 - 14:06:22: ID: STEAM_0:1:48525378 (Eye Test Violation) is on the SMACBANS global banlist
  L 09/23/2019 - 18:19:12: ID: STEAM_0:0:33103919 (Eye Test Violation) is on the SMACBANS global banlist
  L 10/08/2019 - 14:27:56: ID: STEAM_0:0:60956105 (ConVar sv_cheats violation) is on the SMACBANS global banlist

  These bans looks like from CS:S, it would be nice to have a feature that blocks players only have bans from the current game.

• Any other that might help future development of SMAC?

[Silenci0]

At present, the biggest help for something like SMAC would be more contributors/testers. For a project like SMAC to be better supported, both in active development and maintenance, it needs more than one person to address issues, update functionality, add features, and test supported games on both Windows and Linux.

At the end of the day, SMAC is a very large and ambitious project on its own and one person working on it doesn't seem feasible for something this big. It simply needs more people who can work on it besides myself. There is only so much time in a day that can be devoted to something and only so much one can do on their own, so having more people who can help with, if not actively take over, development would be the most desirable thing to happen for this project. SMAC has a lot to offer as a free, open source anti-cheat and active development/testing would be a wonderful thing.

As for your points, I'll address them below:

• Demos might be good for specific cases, so it probably wouldn't hurt to have them on hand. With that said, knowing someone is circumventing the plugins and how they are doing so are two separate things. Currently, I suspect most modern hacks for source-based games will have a work around for something like SMAC since its been available for a long time and most of the detections/algorithms have not changed. I personally would not be able to tell what kind of aimbot they are using from a demo, but it never hurts to have it for reference just in case.
• I was unaware that such a website existed and it seems like a good idea for those who wish to use such a feature. However, keep in mind that it is a feature that is worked on by a 3rd party and they probably use their version of the plugin to monitor SMAC bans and upload said bans to their database, so it would be better for them to maintain their own plugin rather than attempt to write my own. Also, I think their service requires server owners to request to become a trusted server to supply ban information to their database from the SMAC plugins, so if there are no servers supplying information, it is most likely that the info is outdated.
• The only ideas I have are primarily just more contributors/testers for SMAC at this time as that is what it really needs most as stated previously. If it had active development from more than one person, it would be better for SMAC in the long run.