Ban Menu revision request.

[mNote]

Hey there, ULX,

I am mNote and I am a user of the ULX/ULib admin tool and I would like to make a request for the ban menu.

I am an administrator of a pretty large community that have, over the years, gathered over 4,000 steam ids onto our banned_users.cfg file. Now, I know that ULX picks out information from this file because I have done several testings of importing this list and exporting it to the point where I know that ULX will fail to work if it has to read and format a very large file.

Personally, I am asking for a revised ban menu. A ban menu that stores only temporary bans, up to a maximum of maybe 6 digits in minutes (999,999) and no more. It shouldn't also grab the banned_user.cfg list because when that list has 4,000 steam ids in it, ULX will take a VERY long time loading and ULX will fail to work altogether.

I like the ban menu the way it is, but because it picks out perma bans from my banned_user.cfg list, I have to resort to banning by IP and starting the ban list anew.



If you guys can do this, I will greatly appreciate it. I'm actually in the process of finding a better ban management than ULX but I like ULX's interface so much that I'd rather start by asking here.

Please and thank you.

PS: You can find the community I belong to at SteamGamers.com.

[Stickly Man!]

Is it ULX that breaks altogether? Or just ULX's banmenu?

Have you tried using XGUI yet? I have a feeling that your banlist might be a bit too large to handle also (I've been meaning to find someone with a large banlist to do some testing).

If it turns out to take too long to process, I think I can easily add a feature that will limit the amount of processing, OR limit the bans shown. Let me know how it turns out!

[mNote]

Only the ban menu and the system. While it takes time to load all 4,000 steam ids into the menu, it won't kick players that have been previously banned. It also won't ban new users too when an admin utilizes the ban command.

If you were to try to view the ban menu, it will get stuck on the "Loading...." part and it will stay that way for a very very long time. I tried waiting it out and never reached the end.

If you would like a ban list, visit Steam Gamer's Banned page and download the permanent ban list.


By the way, the XGUI won't work with my GMod server because my GMod server runs the "Trouble in Terrorist Town" game mode. This doesn't allow players to use the spawn menu the same way sandbox mode does.

[jay209015]

By the way, the XGUI won't work with my GMod server because my GMod server runs the "Trouble in Terrorist Town" game mode. This doesn't allow players to use the spawn menu the same way sandbox mode does.

-how does the spawn menu block affect XGUI?

[Stickly Man!]

Yeah, the spawn menu shouldn't affect XGUI at all-- in fact, XGUI is designed to replace ULX's current menu, so if ULX's menu works, then XGUI should too

I checked out the banlist and tried it with XGUI on my server.. And here's what I found out:

With XGUI, we're essentially running into the same problem with ULX's menu. The problem isn't that there is too much data to 'process' (which I may add, the ban information from the banned_user.cfg ONLY includes STEAMID and time.. and since most of the times are 0 for permaban, there's almost absolutely nothing to process). The problem is when the server tries to send all of the ban information to the clients. ULX sends it when you open the ban menu, XGUI sends it when the player joins. However, since there is so much data to send, garrysmod calls an "infinite loop" on it, and cancels the function, so it never finishes (thus, both XGUI and ULX's ban menu don't get the message that all of the ban information has been received, so it sits on a loading screen).

I am currently planning a fix for XGUI-- The server will split the banlist by ULX bans and source bans, and will then send the ULX bans, and the source bans IF there are 50 or less source bans. If there are more than 50 source bans (or in your case, a couple thousand), then it will enable an option on the clientside XGUI to retrieve and view the source bans if/when needed. (I'll have to use a more reliable chunk method of sending the information, to prevent garrysmod from infinite-looping-- and I'll do it in a way that it shouldn't block use of the rest of XGUI).

Does that sound good to you? I'll probably be able to have this fixed up and released sometime tomorrow.

Also, because XGUI is very soon going to replace ULX's default menus, there will most likely be no planned fix for the normal ULX menu, so if you're getting any lua errors or issues opening XGUI, let me know!

[mNote]

Ah, that sounds very promising.

I guess I will download and try out XGUI and see if I can properly make it work on my server.

Thanks for the attention and help guys, I appreciate it.


I might need some help getting XGUI to work on my dedicated server.

I dragged the 'lua' folder into my "orangebox/garrysmod/addons/ulx/" folder and then restarted my server. After that, I went and reloaded the new "cache/dua" files onto my FastDL server and gave the server another restart.

Once I get into game, I type in !xgui but it says XGUI is a nil value. I also type in "xgui" into the console and it comes back to say "xgui is an unrecognized command" or something close to that.

[Stickly Man!]

Hmm, for now XGUI is in an addon format, at least, until it's actually included with ULX.

You should be putting the files in the folder addons\xgui\lua, and make sure the addons\xgui\info.txt is there too. Hope this helps!

(Also note that XGUI probably won't open properly because of the ban menu. You can run 'xgui getdata maps' in console if it's stuck at the loading screen to get XGUI to open, but, there will be some missing information and other minor issues.

[mNote]

Hmm, for now XGUI is in an addon format, at least, until it's actually included with ULX.

You should be putting the files in the folder addons\xgui\lua, and make sure the addons\xgui\info.txt is there too. Hope this helps!

(Also note that XGUI probably won't open properly because of the ban menu. You can run 'xgui getdata maps' in console if it's stuck at the loading screen to get XGUI to open, but, there will be some missing information and other minor issues.

Ah, thank you. I'm in the processing of getting a 2nd server so I can do GMod lua script testing on it. I'll be sure to give your XGUI a try on that new server.

By the way, I'm still eager for the revision to the current ban systematics.

[Stickly Man!]

I'm workin on that right now 
I had a few things come up today and I haven't been able to work on it yet. I should technically have it done in a couple hours, but.. I usually end up running into some unforseen problems, so.. we'll see how it goes

[Stickly Man!]

And wow, how it doesn't go! 

I've ended up recording a rather large portion of how XGUI sends/receives data from server to client (and has a progress bar now!) The good news: It works! It's able to send the huge banlist in roughly 10 seconds (along with about 200 detailed ULX bans I added for testing). The main XGUI portion will still be usable while the bans are being retrieved. Bad news: I'm not quite finished, there's quite a few bugs to work out and things I need to finish up due to the recode. Also, for some strange reason, the bans won't send ANYTHING until about two minutes after they're first requested (after they send that first time, it works fine afterwards if you re-send the information).

So, I'll keep working on this tomorrow, hopefully I'll be able to have this ready in a day or two 

[mNote]

Take your time, Stickly Man. I'd like you to make the script as perfect and polished as possible, as not to create further issues. It sounds like the amount of work you're doing is starting to produce great results. Keep it up, and thanks for your trouble.

[Stickly Man!]

No problem 

Everything's starting to turn out quite a bit smoother! I got all of the code fixed up for the new data receiving method (it has a progress bar to show you how much data has been sent!! ), and was able to get all of the bans showing up. Fun fact: DListViews do not like having 4,000+ items in them. Not only do you get < 15 fps, the whole menu literally explodes with graphics glitches! It was great fun! Anyways, so I'm going to do two things: 1) I'm going to have a completely seperate popup-window to show the source bans (and limit it to say 50 bans per 'page'), and 2) I'm going to add a filter to the main ban window where you can show/hide permabans. (I just got this done, actually)

Besides making the seperate ban window, there's one last major problem to fix (that's partly ULX's fault) before I can push an update. For some reason, with a very large ban file, something MAJORLY slows down-- to the point where you have to wait about 2 minutes before data even starts to send (only the first time though, if you try re-sending the data later it's no problem)

I'm pretty sure I can push the release sometime tomorrow (even if we don't get that last bug fixed-- you'll just have to wait a bit for the data to send until we can get it fixed, but everything else should work fine)

[Stickly Man!]

Aannnd now school will be taking up most of my time for a while 

I'm going to double check and make sure that there aren't any major bugs in the code, then I'll send you a PM with my latest version. I think it has a couple unfinished things and just a couple of bugs (one of them being the wait 2 minutes before data starts sending thing), but other than that, it should be working fine.

[JamminR]

<darn responsibility getting in way of hobby><stuff>
the wait 2 minutes before data starts sending thing), but other than that, it should be working fine.

I'd be curious to know if this was just an issue with the server side code actually taking that long to sort 4000+ bans, or if Garry's code has some issue that takes it that long unnaturally. (Or, are you using server side ULib lua commands which don't touch Garry's gmod lua?)

[mNote]

At the moment, I have commented out every part of the ULX code that has banned_user.cfg in its line of text.

So far, it runs just fine and I am still able to permanently ban players off my server... sort of.

But, I would actually like a cleaner version of it since I had to break into the mod in order to modify it.