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[theblankman]

I am with you. I was just amazed that you were the only one not using Mountebank (or even Mountebank/Chapel, which is likely the best pre-Baker opening in Dominion) and also, in need to talk about Dominion to interrupt the too-heated discussion that arose around the identical starting hands.

Well, if I used what everyone else was using, I would've gotten everyone's stories of how they once beat that Mountebank   But yes, let's talk about Dominion.  If my opponent opens Mountebank/Chapel against my 3/4, at least I can open Chapel/something, and trash some of that junk to help my comeback chances.  Mountebank/Chapel may well be the best non-Baker opening in Dominion overall, but I'm not sure if it's the answer to the question: What's the worst kingdom on which to draw 3/4 against 5/2?  The answer to that might be Mountebank plus another decent $2 card (Hamlet? Candlestick Maker?), with no trashers or other Mountebank-counters on the board.  Or it might be Mint/Fool's Gold for all I know.  But at least we're talking about Dominion now, right? 

[blueblimp]

It's okay for games to have slightly different rules when played competitively vs casually. Still, identical starting hands doesn't particularly appeal to me as a rule. As others have said, the impact of unequal opening splits is overrated. There are other factors of comparable importance, such as first player advantage and T3/T4 draws. Importantly, none of these is individually game-deciding. You need a few things to swing in your favour to win purely by luck (such as drawing 5/2 in a super-favourable kingdom like Mint/FG and then getting adequate draws afterward).

Anyway, I don't think luck is much of a problem in competitive Dominion. What diminishes my interest in Dominion over time are not games where I lose by bad luck, but instead games where I felt there were limited opportunities to increase my probability to win. There are always ways I can play better, but the fewer there are, the less interesting the game becomes.

[theblankman]

For example, suppose I'm first player with 4/3, on a board with Trader and Mountebank, and that for whatever reason I decide a defensive Trader is worth opening if my opponent can open Mountebank, but if he can't I should do something more aggressive. If I'm guaranteed equal starting hands, then I don't have to worry about it at all: he has a 4/3 too, so I can go for the more aggressive strategy. If my opponent might have 4/3 or 5/2, then I have to decide: is it worth buying a Trader for "insurance", and trust that I can outplay him later on to counter my "error" if he turns out to have a 4/3 after all? This is a skill that good players are using, today, to increase their win% against weaker players, I'm sure; and it's obviated by identical starting hands.

The probability of 5 copper on top (or bottom) of the starting deck is around 8-9%. Would you really choose an opening that you think has a 91+% chance to be worse than other options?  Unless I screwed up the math badly, I think that good players would rarely if ever let "what if he has 5/2?" influence their opening.

Or perhaps I have a 4/3 as first player, and want to know whether my opponent plans to buy Sea Hag before I decide on my second buy (choosing between Lookout and Silver, say). If his first buy is Silver, I'm still not sure: was that his $4 or his $3 buy?

You should be sure by the time you make your second buy.  Check the game log.  Even if your opponent spent $3 on turn 1, you can see whether he played 3 Copper or 4. 

[GeoLib]

For example, suppose I'm first player with 4/3, on a board with Trader and Mountebank, and that for whatever reason I decide a defensive Trader is worth opening if my opponent can open Mountebank, but if he can't I should do something more aggressive. If I'm guaranteed equal starting hands, then I don't have to worry about it at all: he has a 4/3 too, so I can go for the more aggressive strategy. If my opponent might have 4/3 or 5/2, then I have to decide: is it worth buying a Trader for "insurance", and trust that I can outplay him later on to counter my "error" if he turns out to have a 4/3 after all? This is a skill that good players are using, today, to increase their win% against weaker players, I'm sure; and it's obviated by identical starting hands.

The probability of 5 copper on top (or bottom) of the starting deck is around 8-9%. Would you really choose an opening that you think has a 91+% chance to be worse than other options?  Unless I screwed up the math badly, I think that good players would rarely if ever let "what if he has 5/2?" influence their opening.

Or perhaps I have a 4/3 as first player, and want to know whether my opponent plans to buy Sea Hag before I decide on my second buy (choosing between Lookout and Silver, say). If his first buy is Silver, I'm still not sure: was that his $4 or his $3 buy?

You should be sure by the time you make your second buy.  Check the game log.  Even if your opponent spent $3 on turn 1, you can see whether he played 3 Copper or 4.

This example was clearly used as a demonstration of principle, not the best illustration of a specific situation in which non-identical starting hands is crucial. Also, you are not required to play all of your treasures, so your opponent could easily play just 3 copper even if he had 4 (and if it makes a difference to your opponent's opening, that's the correct play).

Andrew, would it be possible to only implement this for casual/unrated games? I'm fine with people doing basically whatever on there, but I don't think that this variant should be ranked on the pro leaderboard.

I agree with a lot of the comments about unequal starting splits adding important skills to the game (playing non-mirrors, coming back from behind, etc.) I understand the appeal, but am personally not a fan of it (except where necessary in a tournament setting).

I'm weakly in the "leaderboard should be exactly one type of dominion" camp and having this option available for pro games would certainly damage that aspect.

it's a nice idea but the discussion of starting hands / point counters from a competitive perspective is (to me) kind of silly until everyone has the same access to all of the same expansions.

I'm actually starting to think that perhaps it would make sense to have the pro leaderboard only include all-expansions games (promos not required). I think this could only follow some improvement of the casual games, though.

[amalloy]

For example, suppose I'm first player with 4/3, on a board with Trader and Mountebank, and that for whatever reason I decide a defensive Trader is worth opening if my opponent can open Mountebank, but if he can't I should do something more aggressive. If I'm guaranteed equal starting hands, then I don't have to worry about it at all: he has a 4/3 too, so I can go for the more aggressive strategy. If my opponent might have 4/3 or 5/2, then I have to decide: is it worth buying a Trader for "insurance", and trust that I can outplay him later on to counter my "error" if he turns out to have a 4/3 after all? This is a skill that good players are using, today, to increase their win% against weaker players, I'm sure; and it's obviated by identical starting hands.

The probability of 5 copper on top (or bottom) of the starting deck is around 8-9%. Would you really choose an opening that you think has a 91+% chance to be worse than other options?  Unless I screwed up the math badly, I think that good players would rarely if ever let "what if he has 5/2?" influence their opening.

Or perhaps I have a 4/3 as first player, and want to know whether my opponent plans to buy Sea Hag before I decide on my second buy (choosing between Lookout and Silver, say). If his first buy is Silver, I'm still not sure: was that his $4 or his $3 buy?

You should be sure by the time you make your second buy.  Check the game log.  Even if your opponent spent $3 on turn 1, you can see whether he played 3 Copper or 4.

Sure, it can definitely be right to choose a strategy that you think is worse 90% of the time, if the amount it's worse by is not that high. Say I'm deciding between Trader or Monument. Maybe Monument wins against opponent's Mountebank 5% of the time, and beats the opponent's 4/3 55% of the time; meanwhile, Trader wins against Mountebank 30% of the time, and wins against a 4/3 54% of the time. I'm happy to give up that 1% chance of victory in the most-likely scenario in exchange for drastically improving my chances in case my opponent does have Mountebank.

As for playing 3 vs 4 Coppers: this is only true if your opponent presses the "easy" Play Treasures button - for the first shuffle, at least, I almost always play my treasures one at a time, because the possibility that knowledge of my hand will affect my opponent's play is highest then. This is a bit slow on Goko, so it's tedious to do all the time, but think about an in-person game: do you really table all seven of your opening coppers during the first shuffle every time, even when you're opening lighthouse/ambassador? Why reveal to your opponent what you're capable of if you don't have to?

[JW]

The probability of 5 copper on top (or bottom) of the starting deck is around 8-9%. Would you really choose an opening that you think has a 91+% chance to be worse than other options?  Unless I screwed up the math badly, I think that good players would rarely if ever let "what if he has 5/2?" influence their opening.

Chance of 5/2 or 2/5 is 1 in 6. See, e.g., http://mathlaoshi.com/2011/10/13/dominion-starting-hand-probabilities/.

[theblankman]

Chance of 5/2 or 2/5 is 1 in 6. See, e.g., http://mathlaoshi.com/2011/10/13/dominion-starting-hand-probabilities/.

Yep, I mildly screwed up the math.  Did exactly what was at the above link to get 8.3%, but didn't double it.  8.3% is the chance of 5 coppers on turn 1, and also the chance of 5 coppers on turn 2, so the chance of either/or is indeed 16.6% = 1 in 6. 

Sure, it can definitely be right to choose a strategy that you think is worse 90% of the time, if the amount it's worse by is not that high. Say I'm deciding between Trader or Monument. Maybe Monument wins against opponent's Mountebank 5% of the time, and beats the opponent's 4/3 55% of the time; meanwhile, Trader wins against Mountebank 30% of the time, and wins against a 4/3 54% of the time. I'm happy to give up that 1% chance of victory in the most-likely scenario in exchange for drastically improving my chances in case my opponent does have Mountebank.

This may be tangential for the Salvager thread, but it's more fun than the argument a few pages back, so I'll run with it until someone asks us to stop   Let's crunch some win probabilities for the scenario you described: Suppose card A gives you probability A₂ to beat 2/5, and A₃ to beat 3/4.  Card B likewise gives probabilities B₂ and B₃.  Since your opponent gets 2/5 in 1 game out of 6, and we're assuming you have 3/4, the overall win rates with A and B would be:
P_win(A) = 1/6 * A₂ + 5/6 * A₃
P_win(B) = 1/6 * B₂ + 5/6 * B₃

So we can calculate what the differences have to be in order to justify taking a card that does worse against 3/4 but better against 2/5.  If that card is A, we want to know when P_win(A) > P_win(B).  Multiply through by 6 and we have:
A₂ + 5 * A₃ > B₂ + 5 * B₃

Now we bring in the differences.  Let:
D₂ = A₂ - B₂ (since A₂ > B₂)
D₃ = B₃ - A₃ (since B₃ > A₃)

Substitute into our inequality and do a little more algebra and we get D₂ > 5 * D₃.  For every percentage point you give up against 3/4, you need to gain 5 against 2/5 to break even, more than 5 to come out ahead.  How often does that happen?  I'm not sure.  I'm a little dubious that two cards which are usually near-even would change your P_win by 0.25 against a specific opposing opening (the number from your example), but 0.05 sounds more reasonable, so maybe it happens more than I think.  The hypothesis might even be testable if we wanted to data-mine game logs, but I think I'll stop short of writing any code for this  

As for playing 3 vs 4 Coppers: this is only true if your opponent presses the "easy" Play Treasures button - for the first shuffle, at least, I almost always play my treasures one at a time, because the possibility that knowledge of my hand will affect my opponent's play is highest then.

If my opponent does that, I can see it and suspect mind games are afoot, but I still very rarely let it affect my play.  Pretty much all the highest rated players that I've played against use the easy button on their first turns, so I suspect that successful trickery doesn't grant a big advantage.  Therefore I play the odds as well as I can figure them, regardless of my opponent's copper antics. 

[Robz888]

Does anyone else want to publicly identify as a supporter of identical starting hands? I never knew there were so few of us--we could form an exclusive club!

[amalloy]

As for playing 3 vs 4 Coppers: this is only true if your opponent presses the "easy" Play Treasures button - for the first shuffle, at least, I almost always play my treasures one at a time, because the possibility that knowledge of my hand will affect my opponent's play is highest then.

If my opponent does that, I can see it and suspect mind games are afoot, but I still very rarely let it affect my play.  Pretty much all the highest rated players that I've played against use the easy button on their first turns, so I suspect that successful trickery doesn't grant a big advantage.  Therefore I play the odds as well as I can figure them, regardless of my opponent's copper antics.

The point is that it's not mind games at all if I do it every time - it's just providing you with less information. If I play coppers one at a time, you have to play the odds - if I hit Play Treasures and two coppers show up, you don't have to play the odds, you just say "okay, what do I do about his incoming Mountebank?".

Edit: To clarify, it's very important to do it all the time, not just on those occasions when you don't plan to spend all your dollars. If I hit Play Treasures when I have $2 and want to buy a $2, then when I don't do that, and instead play two coppers at once, you know in those cases that I have more than 2, and I haven't gained anything by my habit.

[Kirian]

Does anyone else want to publicly identify as a supporter of identical starting hands? I never knew there were so few of us--we could form an exclusive club!

There's a "view votes" button up underneath the poll.  I'll admit this poll surprised me as well.  I guess it was you, me, and a half-dozen others that were using it.   And now they have me half-convinced to give up my support of it.

[Kirian]

The reason I personally care about automatch is that eventually I will have no choice but to use it (short of inviting specific players to a table). Once MakingFun finally overhauls the game-finding system, there likely won't be a lobby at all and I will be using automatch. I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that the extension will still be going at that point and will simply adapt to be some kind of wrapper to the native automatch, implementing any "features" that MakingFun hasn't.

Incidentally Jeff replied to that email and said yes, this stuff all sounds good. He is on board with getting rid of tables/rooms and having matchmaking more or less as I proposed. The plan naturally being to work out the details when it's time to actually do it.

There will still be some way in there to have some sort of lobby, though, right?  Otherwise setting up tournaments turns a bit impossible.

I think that's an excellent point, though I do think it applies to casual games much more than to competitive games.  One thing a lot of us tend to forget here is that Dominion wasn't really intended, so far as I understand from Donald, to be a competitive game.  (Donald, am I recalling correctly that you've said you really didn't think about tournaments etc. when you were designing?)

I wasn't thinking about tournaments, and man never would be, but it's not that it was designed to be noncompetitive or anything. It was designed to pursue "you build a deck while playing" to its logical extreme, and then after that to work and be balanced (it is obv. a game where you want balanced cards, as opposed to say a bidding game, where you might intentionally want a particular level of imbalance). It isn't say a party game; as usual with my games, it's aiming to have both skill and luck, since that's what most people like, both me and anyone I might randomly be playing with. Skill and luck are built into the premise so it was all down to card balance and deciding how swingy cards could get.

Dominion's actual audience is large. Just the fact that the audience is large means odds are it's more casual than competitive. There are more people interested in games than there are people interested in games that are heavily skill-based (similarly, the tallest mountain in the USA is at least as tall as the tallest mountain in California).

I think you and I are using "non-competitive" in different ways here.  Obviously it is (as are almost all non-coop eurogames) competitive in the Knizia-esque "the goal is to win, but the winning isn't as important as the goal" way.  I meant that, as you say, the target audience is more casual as opposed to... I don't know, what do you call the subset of, say, chess players who spend time studying the game and obviously play it much more than casually, but aren't ever going to come close to the rank of Master anything?  Obviously, these players are competitive, but they obviously aren't professional.  The only word my brain is coming up with is competitive, but I'm happy to have a new word added to my vocabulary.

[Donald X.]

There will still be some way in there to have some sort of lobby, though, right?  Otherwise setting up tournaments turns a bit impossible.

There would be a place to chat, if that's what you mean. I haven't written up any proposals for chatting, but I think obv. you want to be able to chat with 1) everyone you haven't blocked, 2) friends only, and 3) specific people. Potentially there's something else you want too, like creating a chat area for a group, such as tournament players, although that would only start to be relevant if the online version got way more popular; as it stands there is no-one chatting. Possibly there are clans, you know, groups people choose to belong to. And then you want to be able to chat with your clan.

Maybe you mean, a way to tell who's on; sure, you want a way to tell who's on, and for that matter you could have stats on what was going on - there are x games being played, y people waiting to be matched, here's how to match them.

I think you and I are using "non-competitive" in different ways here.  Obviously it is (as are almost all non-coop eurogames) competitive in the Knizia-esque "the goal is to win, but the winning isn't as important as the goal" way.  I meant that, as you say, the target audience is more casual as opposed to... I don't know, what do you call the subset of, say, chess players who spend time studying the game and obviously play it much more than casually, but aren't ever going to come close to the rank of Master anything?  Obviously, these players are competitive, but they obviously aren't professional.  The only word my brain is coming up with is competitive, but I'm happy to have a new word added to my vocabulary.

I wouldn't use chess as an example - it's a good example of what not to do, and part of that includes considering the potential audience for a game like that that isn't ancient. But "competitive" is fine, or "serious." Casual gamers, serious gamers.

Anyway I don't know that I have anything to clarify here. I didn't specifically aim Dominion at casual gamers to the exclusion of serious ones, which should be clear from how things turned out. I don't think that would have been a good move either. If I had a game that I thought only serious hardcore competitive gamers would like, I would slant it towards those players, but also I would expect not to be able to get it published and to have it sell no copies if it did get published. That wouldn't stop me from making it, although the lack of interested playtesters might stop me from finishing it.

Dominion's actual audience is large. Just the fact that the audience is large means odds are it's more casual than competitive. There are more people interested in games than there are people interested in games that are heavily skill-based (similarly, the tallest mountain in the USA is at least as tall as the tallest mountain in California).

"You can only maximize one variable" is my favorite aphorism, but I shouldn't have snuck it in here, because obv. it could happen to be true that most gamers are serious even if a few aren't serious; the fact that serious gamers are a subset of gamers doesn't mean there are more casual gamers than serious gamers.

There are though, there are more casual gamers than serious gamers. I always think of what they said about Magic here: there are way more casual players, but the serious players pay more per player.

[theblankman]

The point is that it's not mind games at all if I do it every time - it's just providing you with less information. If I play coppers one at a time, you have to play the odds - if I hit Play Treasures and two coppers show up, you don't have to play the odds, you just say "okay, what do I do about his incoming Mountebank?".

Edit: To clarify, it's very important to do it all the time, not just on those occasions when you don't plan to spend all your dollars. If I hit Play Treasures when I have $2 and want to buy a $2, then when I don't do that, and instead play two coppers at once, you know in those cases that I have more than 2, and I haven't gained anything by my habit.

We have different definitions of mind games; to me a mind game is anything you do that's intended to make me question the current state of the game.  Hiding part of your hand qualifies.  I don't for mean "mind games" to have any negative connotation, they're strategically valid and part of the game.  Often you play attacks in a way that forces the opponent to estimate what else you're likely to play next, say in cases like Torturer or Mountebank combined with any other discard attack.  That's a mind game too, and one I think has a lot more effect, when it's available, than hiding your opening. 

The particular mind game of hiding your opening is one I happen to find mostly fruitless.  Perhaps I wasn't clear when I said that I always "play the odds."  What I meant is that even if you provide the information you're hiding, I will rarely if ever use it, because I think all that math I did above will rarely yield a case where I actually want to change openings due to knowing yours.  I mean, "What do I do about Mountebank?" is a question that needs to be answered almost any time Mountebank is on the board, cause if you don't buy him on the opening you're still pretty likely to do it on the second or third shuffle.  And generally in this game one needs a plan from the get-go.  So your opening might determine on which shuffle I have to deal with Mountebank, but if he's on the board, I'm making a plan that deals with him as well as I can whenever he shows up. 

[AdamH]

The point is that it's not mind games at all if I do it every time - it's just providing you with less information. If I play coppers one at a time, you have to play the odds - if I hit Play Treasures and two coppers show up, you don't have to play the odds, you just say "okay, what do I do about his incoming Mountebank?".

Edit: To clarify, it's very important to do it all the time, not just on those occasions when you don't plan to spend all your dollars. If I hit Play Treasures when I have $2 and want to buy a $2, then when I don't do that, and instead play two coppers at once, you know in those cases that I have more than 2, and I haven't gained anything by my habit.

We have different definitions of mind games; to me a mind game is anything you do that's intended to make me question the current state of the game.  Hiding part of your hand qualifies.  I don't for mean "mind games" to have any negative connotation, they're strategically valid and part of the game.  Often you play attacks in a way that forces the opponent to estimate what else you're likely to play next, say in cases like Torturer or Mountebank combined with any other discard attack.  That's a mind game too, and one I think has a lot more effect, when it's available, than hiding your opening. 

The particular mind game of hiding your opening is one I happen to find mostly fruitless.  Perhaps I wasn't clear when I said that I always "play the odds."  What I meant is that even if you provide the information you're hiding, I will rarely if ever use it, because I think all that math I did above will rarely yield a case where I actually want to change openings due to knowing yours.  I mean, "What do I do about Mountebank?" is a question that needs to be answered almost any time Mountebank is on the board, cause if you don't buy him on the opening you're still pretty likely to do it on the second or third shuffle.  And generally in this game one needs a plan from the get-go.  So your opening might determine on which shuffle I have to deal with Mountebank, but if he's on the board, I'm making a plan that deals with him as well as I can whenever he shows up.

This is something I've said a lot on my videos/streams, that whenever you buy a $2-cost card on turn 1 you should play your coppers one at a time. You lose nothing by doing this and though the cases are extremely rare, the lack of information your opponent has could cause your opponent to misplay. Fruitless over 99% of the time? Sure. But it's an easy way to improve game play without much additional knowledge or thinking, so why not?

When I play IRL I've developed the habit of putting my lowest-value card on top of my discard and only playing the treasures I need to buy what I want, and I try to reserve the more valuable treasures in my hand if I get a choice (in case they're tracking my Golds in a BM game or some other goofy reason). Easy habit to develop IRL and I don't even think about it anymore. Fruitless over 99% of the time? Sure. But it's an easy way to improve my game play without much additional knowledge or thinking, so why not?

[theblankman]

Re: AdamH (not quote for space): Fair enough, I guess it's just laziness on my part. 

Unrelated note: Though I'm enjoying this discussion, it's now become about strategy and not Salvager, so it should move elsewhere (I asked AI about going off on a tangent here and he concurred).  I'd be happy to keep going in another thread if there's more to say, but obviously I don't have much of a response right this second. 

[qdread]

Wow, I feel stupid... I have been playing on Goko for a year now and never installed Salvager. I did last night and it was like the scales fell from my eyes. Instead of waiting several minutes for a game and then feasting on some noob, I was repeatedly matched with quality opposition almost immediately. Thanks, AI!

[AndrewisFTTW]

Feasting on some noob? Oh boy.

EDIT: AI the above post should be a Salvager testimonial. I'd fund it.

[SCSN]

Wow, I feel stupid... I have been playing on Goko for a year now and never installed Salvager. I did last night and it was like the scales fell from my eyes. Instead of waiting several minutes for a game and then feasting on some noob, I was repeatedly matched with quality opposition almost immediately. Thanks, AI!

It's easy to underappreciate what you've so grown accustomed to. Thanks for reminding me how fortunate we are having this extension.

[ragingduckd]

Wow, I feel stupid... I have been playing on Goko for a year now and never installed Salvager. I did last night and it was like the scales fell from my eyes. Instead of waiting several minutes for a game and then feasting on some noob, I was repeatedly matched with quality opposition almost immediately. Thanks, AI!

Many thanks for the kind words, qdread.

Don't forget that Salvager is a collaborative, open source project.  philosophyguy, nutki, 1wheel, michaeljb, yed, amalloy, and serakfalcon have all contributed code, and there are now 24 beta testers! 

[ragingduckd]

It occurs to me that people may be hesitant to use the blacklist now that it's being stored on the GS server.

FWIW, that table can't be accessed using the public login to the GS database.  As the database admin, I can see it, but here's the sort of thing I see:

Code: [Select]

      blacklister_id      | blacklistee | noplay | nomatch | censor
--------------------------+-------------+--------+---------+--------
 50bfbb9ae4b0a0[redacted] | fap_on_it   | f      | t       | f
 5063625f0cf2b1[redacted] | tgorm       | t      | t       | t
 51102b6ee4b067[redacted] | tgorm       | f      | t       | f
 516d1bb2e4b082[redacted] | fap_on_it   | f      | t       | f
Of course, I see the blacklister's full player ID, not "[redacted]," but I don't see their username.  I deliberately set it up this way so that I wouldn't see who's blacklisting who.  It's true that I can fish out the player name that corresponds to the blacklister's player ID, but I haven't done so except for some early debugging, and I promise not to invade your privacy like that.

I'm planning to eventually use the blacklistee's ID instead of username too, but I'll need to tweak the Salvager UI a bit first.  In the mean time, I do see the usernames of the blacklisted players.  Forgive me for revealing these two here.  I figured it wouldn't surprise anyone to learn that that tgorm and fap_on_it have been blacklisted...

A much better programmer could probably rig up encryption that would keep him from seeing who blacklists who no matter what.  Sadly, I am not that man.  However, I can implement a "do not store my blacklist online" feature if it's something that people want.

[jl8e]

A much better programmer could probably rig up encryption that would keep him from seeing who blacklists who no matter what.  Sadly, I am not that man.  However, I can implement a "do not store my blacklist online" feature if it's something that people want.

Instead of storing the blacklisted user name, you could store a hash (MD5 is entirely sufficient for this).

You’d still be able to check if a specific user has been blacklisted, but not easily get a list of who’s been blacklisted by who. (You could make even that harder by storing the hash of (blacklister name + blacklistee name), but that’s really overkill.)

JS doesn’t have any native hash functions, but you can easily find code for all the standard ones.

[EgorK]

Instead of storing the blacklisted user name, you could store a hash (MD5 is entirely sufficient for this).

But that would defy whole purpose of storing blacklist on server - synchronization of lists between different computers. Or UI would not be pretty

[jl8e]

Instead of storing the blacklisted user name, you could store a hash (MD5 is entirely sufficient for this).

But that would defy whole purpose of storing blacklist on server - synchronization of lists between different computers. Or UI would not be pretty

Not at all. It’s just changing what string you’re comparing in order to tell if somebody’s blacklisted. Before you were checking if username==username_from_list. Now you’d be checking if md5(username)==hash_from_list.

[yed]

Instead of storing the blacklisted user name, you could store a hash (MD5 is entirely sufficient for this).

But that would defy whole purpose of storing blacklist on server - synchronization of lists between different computers. Or UI would not be pretty

Not at all. It’s just changing what string you’re comparing in order to tell if somebody’s blacklisted. Before you were checking if username==username_from_list. Now you’d be checking if md5(username)==hash_from_list.

But it makes the editing impossible.

[blueblimp]

A much better programmer could probably rig up encryption that would keep him from seeing who blacklists who no matter what.  Sadly, I am not that man.  However, I can implement a "do not store my blacklist online" feature if it's something that people want.

Instead of storing the blacklisted user name, you could store a hash (MD5 is entirely sufficient for this).

You’d still be able to check if a specific user has been blacklisted, but not easily get a list of who’s been blacklisted by who. (You could make even that harder by storing the hash of (blacklister name + blacklistee name), but that’s really overkill.)

JS doesn’t have any native hash functions, but you can easily find code for all the standard ones.

If somebody has access to the server, I assume they'd also have access to the user list, and could easily just hash each user and crack the blacklist table that way.