Cfx.re Monthly Update - March 2022 edition

tabarra · 2022-03-15T04:52:39.277Z

“My admins keep abusing the permissions I myself granted to them and they use bad words on their messages”
“please remove txadmin”

I will not waste more time with this subject, as you seem to not understand that txAdmin is used by over 15 thousand servers making it deeply unwise to apply every single one of your “feature requests”.
I’ll just leave here my actual reply (which you decided to just ignore) to your “concerns” where I explained my decisions:

github.com/tabarra/txAdmin

[Feature] Preset ban reasons/times

opened 12:23AM - 23 Feb 22 UTC

closed 04:55AM - 23 Feb 22 UTC

ChrisLenga

enhancement

### Scope Web ### Feature Description Bad words filter to prevent admins from… putting TOS words in when banning or kicking an entire server. ### Use Case Admin kicks or bans a user or the whole server. Admin puts in TOS words that show up on players screen. ### Proposed Solution Set up preset reasons that admins cannot change or modify for admin actions. ### Additional Info We recently had an admin go rogue by kicking an entire server full of 128 players multiple times using the kick all function with the F-Slur. Thanks to this situation, we now have completely disabled txAdmin on this server and a huge chunk of the community now won't play the server. Few of the streamers even got suspended due to the incident causing major backlash against us. Perhaps separating kick all from kick would be wise, and something I've suggested months ago.

DigitalDen · 2022-03-15T05:00:29.775Z

Well you need not worry, as that number is no doubt going to start dropping if things like what’s happening to us and several other communities continues to happen.

Also, seeing as Douth is technically a representative of yours, his answer matters too.

Too bad you won’t waste time on features that protect the community from abuse. Your response proves my initial point entirely, so thank you for that.

DigitalDen · 2022-03-15T05:01:01.760Z

He’s replying now, so I look forward to his response too. Again, another official representative of txAdmin.

douth-c · 2022-03-15T05:19:04.720Z

Howdy,

This response is in to your " txAdmin" section. FXServer comes pre-installed with txAdmin because it’s approved by Cfx members due to the easy accessibility, great web design, prebuilt features, and the general amount it has contributed to the FiveM community. We’ve tried to be direct with you
[chrislenga] in the past, but to no avail. Like you stated in your initial message it’s the server manager or owner’s responsibility to handle permission-based information processing (r; “They cited that its my problem for not vetting staff well enough, which sure, I guess they’re true to an extent, but my team can only do so much.”). We, txAdmin, are not responsible for the wellbeing of FXServers, their admins or what permission based system you/they use. No matter what ‘program’ or ‘web manager’ you use, someone will always be there to ruin the fun.

Now with this being said, it’s not that the txAdmin ‘team’ hasn’t taken significant steps towards preventing or completely stopping administrative-based abuse. For example, more permission nodes were added so specific members allowed into the panel were restricted to X, Y or even Z. We also provide different ‘panel access’ locations to prevent users from seeing console, etc - like most quality monitoring web panels.

Other Steps Towards Anti-Abuse

Prevented abuse by adding PTFX to NoClip.
Since txAdmin version v1 we have added admin-action logging abilities.
Created a transparent system where every admin can see the server log.
Added a advanced permission system, which progressively got more permissions added.

Like Tab said we provide a open source service to over 15,000 servers at any given time. This issue has been relatively isolated to your community, in the capacity of being such a ‘big deal’. I’d like to mention once again that txAdmin is a open source project. You, along with your own development team, are at free will to create pull request for these much “needed features”.

Refrence; GitHub Issue Link (#588)

Douth

DigitalDen · 2022-03-15T05:59:11.561Z

Well I must say, I like this response more than your “its your fault not ours” response back on Github.

We as in the server owners are forced to have the monitor resource installed with the artifacts. Sure, we can delete it, and we have a python script to remove the monitor resource entirely on artifact updates, which we have shared with a few other server owners. Something that is actively being requested more and more as it becomes widely known about as many we’ve talked to are confused about how not to run txAdmin with their server.

You said the following which I will quote.

We, txAdmin, are not responsible for the wellbeing of FXServers, their admins or what permission based system you/they use. No matter what ‘program’ or ‘web manager’ you use, someone will always be there to ruin the fun.

So you provide a tool and resource that’s included in everyone’s server, and the average user doesn’t know how to disable it, so they use it out of ease because its there, but if something goes wrong, its their fault? Is there any license agreements upon downloading the artifacts or prior to setting up txAdmin during installation of artifacts that state this?

You also mention we could easily create a pull request with features, yet, there’s some pull requests that are months old, so that’s a statement of deflection on your part. In fact, looking at the closed ones, it almost seems like there’s more closed and rejected, than there are closed and accepted. Strange.

I’ll quote you on another interesting response.

Like Tab said we provide a open source service to over 15,000 servers at any given time . This issue has been relatively isolated to your community, in the capacity of being such a ‘big deal’. I’d like to mention once again that txAdmin is a open source project. You, along with your own development team, are at free will to create pull request for these much “needed features”.

As someone that owns three separate registered businesses in the US, I find your “take no responsibility” stance rather troubling, especially since your tool is provided to every single server artifact if I’m not mistaken.

Since you bring up things like responsibility, during my next meeting with legal, perhaps I’ll have them do a little research on this situation and get their feedback on the subject. Hopefully by then since we meet once a month, I’ll have some data to go along with that conversation.

I’m especially curious over the liability aspect when it comes to brand damage and damages in general. There’s been some pretty huge cases regarding things like brand damage caused by external factors, specifically services used to carry out situations such as sabotage.

I am certainly delighted that both of you took time to reply to this, and I very much look forward to seeing what the future holds regarding this.

douth-c · 2022-03-15T06:32:41.256Z

I was previously going to respond to your reply, but the bottom mentions legal concerns. Due to this factor, I will unfortunately be ending this conversation here. The severity of these claims means I will need to CC Cfx members and txAdmin maintainers. Have a good one.

CC:

@Taso
@tabarra
@nta
@frenzy-renegade

nta · 2022-03-15T09:14:35.984Z

I happened to stumble across this whole message exchange and I’m really not in the mood for this so I’ll probably be too hostile, but here - see these as personal opinions at best as I try to stay out of any actual executive action in these regards:

DigitalDen:

This requirement since it isn’t properly enforced

What would you consider ‘proper enforcement’ here?

Not giving a grace period: not ‘proper’, people start community raids and attacks overloading both our support staff and volunteer community moderators.
Giving a grace period: not ‘proper’ because of you considering it ‘not properly enforced’, also much higher conversion rates over time.

If your concern is something else, however, it’d be helpful to explicitly state that.

DigitalDen:

Then you see a brand new server without all of that overhead launch with Patreon

Patreon has a 7% fee for new accounts, plus some payment processor/conversion fees. This is more than the Tebex fee (which makes up less than half of the 15% advertised), and more than the payment processor fees, as well.

Other than that, this specific argument is a bit of ‘if nobody gets caught, why should I not abuse either?’, which is generally a non-argument: the answer should be because not abusing is the right thing to do in any case, in any context.

DigitalDen:

Why doesn’t Cfx.re use Tebex for our monthly packages?

Migrating existing subscriptions across payment processors is a near-impossible operation, and doing so just to placate some people who are going to use it as a ‘justification’ to not read what they can and can not do is wrong.

We’re planning on rewriting the ToS page to be more readable and show examples of what is/isn’t accepted sometime in the near future, however. Think something like the Xbox Community Standards in readability.

DigitalDen:

I know some others rely on things like Easy Anti-Cheat for example.

The particular ‘project’ mentioned seems to just rely on brand-awareness of ‘look, this is a proper defense!’ to convince ill-informed people that ‘their’ project is ‘better’.

The open (EOS) version of EAC doesn’t actually have any game-specific detections, all it does is some handle hardening and slightly more enforced HWID bans without requiring game developers to implement these.

Looking at cheating forums, there’s actually more free public cheats for the project you’re naming than for FiveM.

DigitalDen:

With FiveM growing as rapidly as it is, how does the anti-cheat compare to that of say, Easy Anti Cheat or other commercially aligned detection methods?

Given it’s game-specific, and we use some novel methods for HWID bans - one of the main features of these ‘kernel-mode anticheats’ - that aren’t generally supported by popular ‘spoofer’ drivers, I’d say pretty much on par.

DigitalDen:

As much as we love RedM, we find it increasingly difficult dealing with the insanely slow download speeds we encounter when downloading files from the Cfx.re servers

These files are actually not downloaded from any servers we control and are rather from a P2P environment, in part due to bandwidth costs, in part due to these being more complete sets of game files than FiveM’s (which are delta patches), which may be questionable legally.

It is confusing that the UI looks the same as it does on FiveM, however, yes, and it may lead to the expectation that this is downloaded from some shared servers.

DigitalDen:

Make it easier for those of us when updating artifacts to not include txAdmin.

If you don’t launch in ‘monitor mode’ (i.e. if passing a +exec argument), ‘txAdmin’ does not run at all.

However, I personally do agree the way Tabarra et al. are handling the relationship between the main project and their ‘sub-component’ has a lot of room for improvement, since we also often have to correct some perceived odd choices performed by them.

outsider310:

why even mention RedM? a web page?

I’m surprised a paragraph like the following wasn’t included:

In addition to that, we have been working on top fixes for RedM issues (including ones related to OneSync), but due to current world events affecting our main RedM developer, not much has happened for the past month.

Also, RedM still runs on a shared codebase with other Cfx.re platform modifications, so many improvements in FiveM also apply there.

DigitalDen:

Again, another official representative of txAdmin.

This is the one of the two parts about ‘txAdmin’ here that I’ll reply to, but I feel it having its own ‘official representatives’ is somewhat… problematic.

The other is that a missing access control feature can not remotely be seen as anyone’s ‘fault’, and blaming anyone here is counterproductive: both blaming @DigitalDen for ‘giving someone permissions to kick people with any reason’ - people may violate trust unpredictably and take a complete 180, and blaming the txAdmin maintainers for not instantly prioritizing a feature to mitigate any abusive user input, do not help this discussion at all.

I don’t know if any other server owners had issues with staff writing inappropriate text in ‘ban reason’ fields, but if not, I can see why this feature wasn’t prioritized, and I can also see why @DigitalDen wants to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, as that is a typical human response to sudden immoral behavior on the part of any individual, especially one that was considered trustworthy before.

The escalation about ‘I’ll talk to my lawyers!’ below is rather silly and even more so counterproductive. If you want to take legal action against anyone, why not do so against your abusive ex-staff member?

DigitalDen · 2022-03-15T09:52:24.143Z

As always you do not disappoint with your responses.

What would you consider ‘proper enforcement’ here?

Not giving a grace period: not ‘proper’, people start community raids and attacks overloading both our support staff and volunteer community moderators.

Giving a grace period: not ‘proper’ because of you considering it ‘not properly enforced’, also much higher conversion rates over time.

If your concern is something else, however, it’d be helpful to explicitly state that.

This is just a very basic thought, and I can think on it a bit more, but what about some type of rewards system implemented for length of time with Tebex on the FiveM side? Tackle it with a rewards style implementation. I’m not entirely sure what that would look like, yet, but by offering more incentive to play by the rules, it gets more playing by the rules, removing temptation to not play by the rules, and indirectly lowers the workload on the team handling such reports.

Could even look into some type of loyalty based on annual sales volume, or something of that sort. Granted, that is if Tebex wants to play ball with any proposals and concepts, but its an interesting theory/thought.

Migrating existing subscriptions across payment processors is a near-impossible operation, and doing so just to placate some people who are going to use it as a ‘justification’ to not read what they can and can not do is wrong.

We’re planning on rewriting the ToS page to be more readable and show examples of what is/isn’t accepted sometime in the near future, however. Think something like the Xbox Community Standards in readability.

I actually like this idea a lot, and I feel like that would be a great step forward in terms of getting more onboard to the proper way of doing things, in general, not just in regards to things like Tebex. As FiveM continues to grow tremendously, especially with streamers, this should absolutely be a “sooner rather than later” task.

These files are actually not downloaded from any servers we control and are rather from a P2P environment, in part due to bandwidth costs, in part due to these being more complete sets of game files than FiveM’s (which are delta patches), which may be questionable legally.

It is confusing that the UI looks the same as it does on FiveM, however, yes, and it may lead to the expectation that this is downloaded from some shared servers.

This has been something I’ve approached maybe a year back now. Is there anything we as a community can do to help speed things up a bit? Obviously there’s a lot of variables here, but I’m sure many of us would be absolutely willing to pitch in to help speed this process along to help grow the community.

If you don’t launch in ‘monitor mode’ (i.e. if passing a +exec argument), ‘txAdmin’ does not run at all.

However, I personally do agree the way Tabarra et al. are handling the relationship between the main project and their ‘sub-component’ has a lot of room for improvement, since we also often have to correct some perceived odd choices performed by them.

Good to know on this. I know I’ve had some pretty strange results before we went the route of ripping it out entirely. Perhaps it could be a Linux issue that’s cropping up at random though. I’ll play around with this some.

This is the one of the two parts about ‘txAdmin’ here that I’ll reply to, but I feel it having its own ‘official representatives’ is somewhat… problematic.

The other is that a missing access control feature can not remotely be seen as anyone’s ‘fault’, and blaming anyone here is counterproductive: both blaming @DigitalDen for ‘giving someone permissions to kick people with any reason’ - people may violate trust unpredictably and take a complete 180, and blaming the txAdmin maintainers for not instantly prioritizing a feature to mitigate any abusive user input, do not help this discussion at all.

I don’t know if any other server owners had issues with staff writing inappropriate text in ‘ban reason’ fields, but if not, I can see why this feature wasn’t prioritized, and I can also see why @DigitalDen wants to prevent this kind of thing from happening again, as that is a typical human response to sudden immoral behavior on the part of any individual, especially one that was considered trustworthy before.

The escalation about ‘I’ll talk to my lawyers!’ below is rather silly and even more so counterproductive. If you want to take legal action against anyone, why not do so against your abusive ex-staff member?

I agree with you, as we need to get past the pointing fingers and get down to solutions at this point. I’m working on gathering data that proves this is a problem, and then bringing it back to our team to determine if we want to start pitching in, or go with something different. There’s now multiple issues we have with the txAdmin project and its team, so I’m not sure if our team is looking to work with them. I do believe the data is required though, as one server we help out on is actually dealing with a real big mess as a Twitch Partner got suspended due to a similar issue.

As far as the lawyers, this wasn’t so much let me run off to my lawyers and go after txAdmin or anything, but I would like to see what the options are and how we as a community that run servers cna protect ourselves. As you’ve pointed out above, things can be highly unpredictable, and many server owners are real life companies that could have severe consequences. It only takes one incident to get extremely messy as a result of social media nightmares, clips of incidents happening and so on.

Regarding the ex staff member, I am happy to report his ISP did in fact suspend his internet privileges for using their ISP to cyber bully through means of hate speech. They couldn’t get into details obviously, but it was addressed on that front.

We have since with guidance from our legal team began putting necessary disclosures in place to offer us more protection and options to deter similar behavior in the future.

tabarra · 2022-03-15T11:22:00.566Z

DigitalDen:

I’m working on gathering data that proves this is a problem, and then bringing it back to our team to determine if we want to start pitching in, or go with something different.

I don’t know what “gathering data” means in this context. In the last almost 3 years not a single admin ever reported this issue. If you think those people are out there, feel free to tell them to reach out to me as it would certainly be valuable information.
Also, would be really productive if you for once acknowledge that in my original github response I actually agreed that this could be a feature, and highlighted the technical reasons why I wouldn’t work on that. But as a small correction, as stated above, new input from other server admins will be taken into consideration.
And I find really hard to believe that getting kicked/banned/whatever from a server with “ToS words” in the reason would get you suspended from Twitch. If this happened, please ask this partner to contact me so I can understand better what happened.

DigitalDen:

There’s now multiple issues we have with the txAdmin project and its team,

Such as…?
Last time you “quit txadmin” was exactly the same reason: me not prioritizing a very much “you” feature request.

DigitalDen:

You also mention we could easily create a pull request with features, yet, there’s some pull requests that are months old,

There are precisely two pull requests that are more than 3 weeks old (and not from the tx team itself), and the author of both of them are aware of the issue as they were discussed either on github or on discord.

Newton · 2022-03-15T16:22:52.195Z

Thanks CFX & TxAdmin

ChatDisabled · 2022-03-15T16:44:13.766Z

RedM

I_Love_My_Life · 2022-03-15T20:56:30.097Z

Was trying to use tebex API system. I sent about 50 requests in 2 minutes and it blocked my request for next 5 minutes lol.

Idk how fivem can expect us to use tebex as server owners when they don’t even have logical APIs to fetch player details and information and process them rapidly.

Contacting them did not result in any conclusive results. We just got responded by “Don’t spam requests”. But idk how a server running 100+ players can tebex + automation script for rewards.

I also have a question about outages,

Is it just me or only the servers who use encrypted maps/scripts only result in players crashing when a outage occurs?

I have seen many servers running perfectly fine if they are not using encrypted maps/scripts.

Maybe fivem crashes the clients if the server starts a map which cannot be verified? Or I might be totally something wrong.

nta · 2022-03-16T09:09:44.266Z

I_Love_My_Life:

Idk how fivem can expect us to use tebex as server owners when they don’t even have logical APIs to fetch player details and information and process them rapidly

Idk how you can expect us to expect any different when you don’t report any issues you run into, ask anyone for assistance, or request APIs that you feel you need.

I_Love_My_Life:

Is it just me or only the servers who use encrypted maps/scripts only result in players crashing when a outage occurs?

Yeah, that is ‘just you’. There’s no client-to-backend check for ‘encrypted scripts’ at all, this is all handled and checked when the server starts and authenticates its key stuff.

‘players crashing when an outage occurs’ is an entirely unrelated bug that happened since last week’s update no matter if a server ‘uses encrypted scripts’ and in fact got fixed in this week’s update.

I_Love_My_Life · 2022-03-16T17:21:10.423Z

nta:

Idk how you can expect us to expect any different when you don’t report any issues you run into, ask anyone for assistance, or request APIs that you feel you need.

Tebex natives and other things Discussion

Is there a proper way to attach tebex store to our server? I have tried using natives like LoadPlayerCommerceDataExt IsPlayerCommerceInfoLoadedExt but, they always return “false” for any player. Idk if its related to them not linking their fivem account to fivem itself or something else. Also, this doesn’t work as tebex doesn’t accept webhooks as a IP. They only accept domains for the link of webhook. So I don’t know what would be the best way to link store to server for logs/rewards a…

ClearPedBloodDamage Not Synced OneSync reports

Client Using canary? : Yes/No, doesn’t matter in this issue. Windows version: : 10, latest one. System specifications: : Dosen’t matter. Server Operating system: Windows Artifact version: Don’t matter. IP address: Don’t matter. Resources: Don’t matter. System specifications: Don’t matter. Incident Summary: Blood stains on clients are not synced if the player is out of your infinity bubble. Expected behavior: It should be synced if the player enters your zone after the blood is remove…

A way to make one script get multiple export names Platform Suggestions

Just like, provides { 'mumble-voip', 'dumb-voip' } helps in “dependency”. There should be a way to do the same thing with exports. For example, I can name a script “script_01”, and add provides as above. And do something like exports["dumb-voip"]:functionOne() and it would still allow the export to run on “script_01” script. And not say “dumb-voip not found”. That helps creators who are selling framework scripts but their customers have different core script names or something.

We do report them. But maybe we just let it slip when no one bothers to fix it.

nta · 2022-03-17T08:03:05.547Z

The only topic you linked related to Tebex wasn’t even a report, it was a question, that some community member also responded to, and you then subsequently ignored that response.

The second is a report that would be considered as low priority even if someone did see, and the third looked like a vague request as ‘provide’ should already work that way, and also wasn’t noticed by anyone at the time it was posted.

Again, not sure how anyone should ‘bother to fix’ a question that isn’t even a report.

mkcx · 2022-03-18T22:12:42.205Z

Yo awesome work!
Two things:

RedM website is really nice.
please fix your major outages/shutdowns. Its frustrating, people even pay your patreon licenses and then they have those out times. It would be awesome if you could remove the “request Server” when trying to login to a server.

Thanks for reading and have a good day.

MasiBall · 2022-03-20T07:57:35.337Z

mkcx:

please fix your major outages/shutdowns. Its frustrating, people even pay your patreon licenses and then they have those out times.

Every other ‘game companies’, for example, Ubisoft and Rockstar have outages too.
I don’t think that your argument ‘people even pay your Patreon’ makes any sense. Paying Patreon subscriptions and having outages aren’t related in any way, unless Patreon has an outage. That’s just the same thing as that you would buy csgo and then say ‘omg, I bought the game but there is an outage, fix it.’

If the maintainers don’t know that there is an issue, they can’t fix it. Once an issue appears, and there is an outage. They investigate and fix it as soon as possible.

In my opinion, the maintainers have done a pretty good job, handling all of these recent outages.

Next_Game · 2022-03-21T09:12:56.420Z

Thanks for the info and hard work!

douth-c · 2022-03-21T14:02:06.503Z

please fix your major outages/shutdowns. Its frustrating, people even pay your patreon licenses and then they have those out times.

Cfx.re is a open source platform. Outages happen, like with ever other ‘company’. You simply can’t “fix your major outages”, when they are made aware they issue a fix. By the way, the patron subscription is not required and completely volunteer based .

tl;dr shit happens.

system · 2022-03-21T17:01:26.660Z

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