THIS IS COPIED AN PASTED FROM A LINK I FOUND AWHILE AGO AN IS THE MAIN REASON I HAVE AN ALLOW WHAT I DO IN OUR SERVERS.


What Makes a Good Admin?
Besides wrangling bandwidth, supporting hardware, paying hosting dues, and choosing which games, mods, and maps to host, you have to be a good administrator. The reason games exist is for people to have fun. If your server doesn't provide an atmosphere that promotes enjoyment, people won't play on it.

To gauge the level of enjoyment players are experiencing on your server, it's a good idea to play on it yourself. Talk to the other players, ask them what they'd like to see on your server, take suggestions for maps and mods to host, and just be a part of the community that forms on your server.

Note: If you choose to run a server rather than to rent one, you should always run a dedicated server on one machine and play on the server with a different PC. Dedicated servers don't have to crunch data associated with actually playing on the machine, so they perform better for the players who connect to them.

Unfortunately, there will always be bad sports: people who seek to offend other players, profane players, people who initiate personal attacks on other players, people who deliberately kill members of their own team (called teamkilling, abbreviated as TK), people who use programs like aimbots (scripts that aid in aiming at other players) to cheat, or people who exploit vulnerabilities in the game software itself to see through walls or become invincible.

The best way to deal with unsavory players is to be diligent. Warn abusers not to be disruptive, and if they continue to play in an unsavory fashion, kick them off of your server. All game servers provide administrators with ways to boot players and even ban them based on their IP addresses.

"One word. OK, two words. Good Admins!" says Larkin when asked how he deals with unsavory players. "If you don't have good admins, you won't have a good server. What do I mean by good? Admins who know the game they're in charge of, know how to deal with people of all ages and all kinds (they come out of the wood work, I'm telling ya) and know how to communicate and work together with other admins."

Pemberton is more concise: "We always warn, kick, and then ban." Burns also advocates banning. "We have a strict policy against cheating: If you're caught cheating, you're banned for life," he says. "We take great care when banning someone as we don't want to ban a person just because they are really good. As for profanity, we don't have a very strict rule against it, as trying to prevent it would just drive people away from our servers."

Some games have anti-cheat software available for them. GameVault, for instance, offers HLGuard, a server-side program for Half-Life and its mods that looks for cheats like aimbots and other hacks. ServerXtreme and Art of War Central leave it up to you to deal with cheaters, but both allow you to install anti-cheat programs if you want.

A more extreme way to ensure a fun server is to password protect it and only allow players whom you invite to join. Alternately, if the game allows it, you can hide your server from server lists, requiring players to manually punch in your server's IP address to join. Hiding or password protecting your server is a must when you host clan matches or ladder tournaments, to prevent players not involved with your competitions from wandering in.

With a little effort and a lot of care, you can host a fulfilling game server for any game you choose. Playing the game you want with the maps and mods you choose is immensely satisfying?especially when a community of regular gamers starts to blossom on your server. Whether you do it yourself or rent is up to you. Always remember, you're in it to have fun!