Banning/Unbanning Info

From cAn's Crew

If I remember right, the banned id's are read from a file and kept in memory until the server is shut down; usually read from banned_users.cfg. So let's say we want to ban someone after the fact (they are not connected to the server), using their steam id:

banid 0 STEAM_ID:xxxxx
writeid

The first command tells the server to ban the user permanently (the second argument is the number of minutes, with 0 = perma), and the results of that are kept in memory. "writeid" tells the server to flush out what is in memory back to file...banned_user.cfg.

Now to unban, on the css server, we do

ma_unban STEAM_ID:xxxxx

which does all of the right things. But on the INS server, we don't have mani. So try

removeid STEAMID:xxxx
writeid

Where again, the first command removes the id from the banlist in memory, and the second command writes the banlist to file...banned_user.cfg.

So what this means is that, unless the server is down when you do it, editing banned_users.cfg directly is ineffective. This file gets overwritten just before the server goes down on a restart, from whatever the banlist is in memory on the server. Also, if you edit the file, it doesn't directly affect what is in memory on the server either; so it will appear ineffective in that case as well.