Metrics: Moderation, Possible Alternative Accounts and On Watch

What this is for

When a banned player comes back under a new name, or one person runs several accounts to farm rewards, the account names alone will not tell you. Metrics helps by pointing out possible alternative accounts: other players on your servers who may be the same person, each with the reason it thinks so and how sure it is. It also shows the countries a player connects from, lets you put players On Watch, raises alerts, and keeps your notes on a player.

All of this is for the account owner and administrators. Your players never see any of it.

We never show addresses

GameGrid never stores, shows or returns a player's connection address: not on any page, in any download, in the API or in the Discord bot. Here is how it can still compare connections:

• The moment a player connects, the machine your server runs on turns their connection into a keyed one-way fingerprint, a code that cannot be turned back into the address, and notes the country. The address itself is thrown away straight away.
• Fingerprints are made with a key unique to your account, so they are only ever compared between your own players. Nobody can match your players against another server owner's.
• You see names, reasons and countries. You never see an address or a fingerprint, and neither does GameGrid support.
• Fingerprints are deleted 180 days after the player was last seen on that connection.

Country data: IP Geolocation by DB-IP (db-ip.com).

Possible alternative accounts

Open a player's profile from Metrics (the Players button, or the Players tab). On the Overview tab, the Possible alternative accounts card lists every other player who may be the same person:

• their name (click it to open their profile, even on another of your servers);
• why, in words;
• how sure: low, medium or high, with a number from 0 to 100;
• when it was first seen.

The reasons, strongest first:

A shared connection counts only once the less frequent player of the two has connected from it at least twice, so one visit from a friend or a family member is not enough. When five or more players share a connection, as at a LAN event, a school or a VPN, it is marked as less certain, and a connection shared by very many players is ignored.

Weak links are hidden until you tick Show weak links.

A possible alternative account is a hint, never proof. Two brothers on the same home internet will show up as a possible pair. Nothing is ever done automatically: no ban, no kick, no change to their economy. If you know they are different people, click Not the same person. That link is hidden and is only suggested again if the evidence becomes much stronger.

Every time someone opens the card it is recorded in your audit log.

Which games compare connections

On every game, players linked to the same Discord account are still found.

Countries seen

Under the alternative accounts card, Countries seen lists each country the player connected from, with its flag and how many connections came from it. It is a country only, never a city or an address.

On Watch

Put a player On Watch when you want to know the moment they come back. Open their profile, choose the Admin tab, write a reason and click Put On Watch. For a player the game identifies by an account id, the watch covers every server on your account.

When they connect:

• an alert appears in the profile's Admin tab and in the Activity tab's Alerts filter;
• a notice appears in your account's notifications, under its own On Watch heading;
• if you set up /config moderation-channel in the Discord bot, it is posted there;
• if you subscribed a webhook to player.watched_connected, it is sent there.

The On Watch filter in the Players tab and the player drawer shows everyone you are watching. The Discord bot can add, remove and list watches with /metrics watch.

Alerts

Choose which alerts you want under Metrics, Settings, Alerts:

• A player On Watch connects: on by default.
• A new possible alternative account is found: off by default.
• A kill spree: off by default. You choose how many kills within how many minutes (10 kills in 5 minutes to start with).
• A chat line contains one of these words: off by default. Whole words, any case, so "hack" matches "a hack!" but not "hackathon". The alert names the word and the player, never the message.

Changing the alerts needs permission to manage the server, and every change is recorded in your audit log. An alert never does anything to a player by itself.

Who sees which alert. A possible alternative account names two players, so only the account owner and customer administrators (the people who can see possible alternative accounts) see those alerts, in the Activity tab, the Admin tab, the alerts list, the Activity download and the Customer API. A chat-word alert names the word and the speaker, so only people who can read your server's chat see it. Everyone with access to the server still sees the On Watch and kill spree alerts. The name of the person who last edited a player's note is shown only to the account owner and administrators. Alerts about possible alternative accounts and chat words are kept for 180 days, like chat.

Notes and the moderation history

The profile's Admin tab also shows:

• your note on the player (up to 2,000 characters, visible to your team only);
• the alerts about this player;
• moderation and admin actions taken on them, such as kicks and list changes;
• whether they are on each of the server's player lists (such as its ban list, whitelist or admin list), with a link to Settings, Player management, where bans, kicks and the whitelist are managed.

There is no "ban by connection": Metrics never blocks anyone by their connection.

In the Discord bot and the API

• /metrics alts <player> shows a player's possible alternative accounts and countries, only to you. The bot's API key needs player_metrics:alts, which is in no key preset: add it yourself. /metrics watch add, remove and list manage On Watch.
• /config moderation-channel posts On Watch alerts to a channel, and new possible alternative accounts too if you choose alt-alerts: true. Alternative-account alerts reach the bot only when its API key has player_metrics:alts and belongs to the account owner or an administrator; a key without it gets none.
• In the Customer API, player_metrics:alts reads possible alternative accounts and countries, player_metrics:write manages On Watch and notes, and player_metrics:read reads the watch list and the alerts (possible-alternative-account alerts also need player_metrics:alts, and chat-word alerts player_metrics:chat, on a key owned by the account owner or an administrator). See API Scopes.
• Webhooks: player.watched_connected and player.alt_account_detected. See Webhook Configuration.

When a player asks to be forgotten

Forget player (profile, Admin tab) deletes the player's fingerprints and countries, every possible alternative account they are part of (and the alerts about them), their On Watch entries and notices, and their pending leaderboard milestones, along with the rest of their Metrics data. See Metrics and Your Players' Privacy.