EA is permanently banning Linux players on Battlefield V - <AUTHOR> https://forums.lutris.net/t/ea-banning-dxvk-on-battlefield-v/7810/# <comment><USER2> Anti-cheat software is an absolute shit show of cat-and-mouse tactics. It's often difficult to distinguish anti-cheat software from rootkits or spyware. They're invasive and user hostile, and they frequently cause collateral damage that is swept under the rug and that support tacitly refuses to acknowledge.

This has happened on multiple occasions with Blizzard:

\- [https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blizzard...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Blizzard- Banning-DXVK-Wine)

\- [https://m.slashdot.org/story/75350](https://m.slashdot.org/story/75350)

Of course, although Blizzards initial response was to claim that the users cheated and were lying, they did eventually fix the problem the first time (although IIRC they never reversed all of the bans for the very first WoW Wine ban wave.) Now they have a bit more experience with the issue so it seems it is getting more attention.

However with EA I don't really have utmost confidence they will pay any attention to this, so I'd guess it's time to get loud if you want any hope of this being fixed.

<comment><USER3> > Anti-cheat software is an absolute shit show of cat-and-mouse tactics. It's > often difficult to distinguish anti-cheat software from rootkits or spyware. > They're invasive and user hostile, and they frequently cause collateral > damage that is swept under the rug and that support tacitly refuses to > acknowledge.

Sure, but I don't see a good alternative. Cheating is a real problem and will quickly destroy your online community (see other comments in this thread). Sacrificing a small percent of your playerbase in the name of having a functioning online system at all seems like a reasonable solution to me. It's unfortunate that it is necessary, but people are jerks.

<comment><USER4> >Sure, but I don't see a good alternative

Allow users to votekick and voteban. Provide the server software for players to host their own servers and provide their own solutions to these problems.

These are tools and approaches that we had in past games and while they are not perfect, they are better than these black box invasive anticheat solutions born from a desire to avoid giving community control to users.

>Sacrificing a small percent of your playerbase in the name of having a functioning online system at all seems like a reasonable solution to me

Only if you provide a robust and empowered support staff to quickly unban and resolve false positives. That is, actually take responsibility, which is something game developers and major publishers seem allergic to.

<comment><USER5> Seems to me the shift to "Matchmaking" style online multiplayer has caused a whole lot of problems that weren't that big a deal back in the "community server" days. I personally think one can blame the rampant toxicity of players on this removal of the community aspect.

<comment><USER6> My hot-take as a smaller game designer is that I am skeptical that global competitive ladders are good design. I admit that's fringe, and I'm not going to fight people over it. But I can't imagine myself ever designing a system like that for any of my games.

First, I think these systems ignore technical realities, and design has to pay attention to real-world constraints. Blocking cheaters is insanely hard, and almost no real-time games that I know of do it at what I believe is an acceptable level.

It's a nice idea that I don't think is technically supported, in the same way that it would be a nice idea if my photorealistic MMO didn't have loading screens anywhere and loaded everything instantly. It's not good design to spend a bunch of effort hinging your game design on something that's not technically possible for you to do.

Second, I think these systems ignore player incentives. I think that global competitive ranking encourages the worst of playerbases, that skill is an arbitrary mechanism to optimize on instead of something like how close each match was, or player-reported satisfaction levels, or variety of play-styles, or any other of a dozen other metrics.

Third, caring about bots radically shrinks your design space. You can't have exploits, players have to have a "right" way to play, modding has to be more limited. It shrinks the game not only in the sense that it makes your systems more complicated -- it fundamentally shrinks what your game can do as a _game_ , and how your game can evolve with the rest of the medium.

Finally, not only is skill not a particularly rewarding metric to optimize on when what you really want is for your players to have fun, most of the problems with automation explicitly only are a problem for competitive matchmaking. If you're optimizing for player-reported satisfaction, you probably don't _care_ if people are botting your game, because successful bots will be optimizing for creating good matches instead of for just winning[0].

Personal plug, with my current project, Loop Thesis, LAN play is the only multiplayer. I only want people to play with friends, and I'm not trying to build some kind of community or network. That decision has simplified my architecture _so much_ , the game is so much more modder friendly, the networking code is so much simpler, everything is nicer, and more stable, and more player friendly, because I don't have to care about bots and cheaters.

Future games that I make, even if they include global matchmaking, will not have global competitive rankings. My personal take now has become that 90% of the time these systems are a design antipattern.

It's counterproductive. I want players playing my game to have fun. I have to ban bots because they make the game not fun. The reason the bots make the game not fun is because all of my design hinges fun on giving players an optimization problem that I explicitly don't want them to solve in creative ways. The bots are solving the optimization problem _too well_. So getting rid of that optimization problem, getting rid of the rankings, makes so many other design/engineering problems go away. The bots aren't the problem, the optimization problem is the problem.

[0]: [https://xkcd.com/810/](https://xkcd.com/810/)

<comment><USER7> League of Legends doesn't seem to suffer from bots - if you don't want to believe me, check out [https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/eieyz2/why...](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/eieyz2/why_are_there_less_cheaters_and_hackers_in_league/) , and their regional rank system works well enough and not only useful and provide good values to the players, it is absolutely necessary at higher ranks.

Likewise, AFAIK, dota2 doesn't seem to suffer much from bots, and their rank system seems to work ok.

Arguably Fortnite / Overwatch / PUBG style games do suffer from aimbots, but whatever downside they bring, those games seem wildly successful. And the regional / global ranking system seems integral to their success.

Given that a large number of highly successful games do have it, I don't think your argument has much of a merit - it's surely a challenge to implement them but it seems like a worthwhile problem to solve, rather than avoid, at least if your goal includes global / regional success beyond small niche.

<comment><USER6> Not going to argue get into an argument on this, but I believe a large portion of both League and Dota's widespread community toxicity problems have their roots in the global ranking systems that they use. I also think that their ranking systems make them much, much less accessible to new players, and encourage their existing playerbase to experiment less.

To the extent that some games can legitimately get away with global competitive ranks without suffering bots, that doesn't mean it's a healthy choice for every (or even most) other games. Of course, no design rule is absolute, we're just speaking in generalities.

That being said, both League and Dota are investing massive resources to prevent botting on a system that arguably would be just as if not more enjoyable if it was redesigned. I feel the same way about games like Overwatch, even some inherently globalized systems like Pokemon Go that would be difficult to change -- I don't personally believe the ranking systems are making them better. I think they're there because they're expected to be there, not because they're reinforcing the core design of the game.

<comment><USER8> If you think DotA2's matchmaking is unfriendly to new players, I don't think you ever experienced DotA1 matches. Every single game was wildly unbalanced, and as a result of one or so players, every single game was an absolute stomp where the losing team never had a chance.

The skill gap between good and bad players is ludicrous. It's like putting LeBron James against middle schoolers. There simply isn't a fun game when the game is determined by the singular best player, and the other nine players are being carried to victory regardless of their contribution, or being pounded into the dirt because they're less than exceptional.

I could never go back to random matchmaking after experiencing global rankings.

<comment><USER6> Of course, using a bad metric is often better than using no metric at all, but it doesn't follow that the current strategy is optimal.

It especially doesn't follow that global rankings should be a user-visible metric, or an explicit player motivator (a la seasonal rankings). People don't bot because they're unhappy with the players they're matched against. They bot because they want a publicly visible number to get bigger and because player rewards are locked behind competitive rankings.

<comment><USER9> But there are no bots available that can play the game for you competently. Even deepmind had to have quite a few restrictions to do so and such a system most likely can't even learn an evolving metagame.

People who join ranked want to compete. If you don't want to then there is another queue available that's not a public ranking.

<comment><USER6> > But there are no bots available that can play the game for you competently.

Then who cares whether or not players bot? Let them. Heck, go all the way and actively support it if it's not an issue.

On the design side, I'm seeing a number of people commenting on here that getting rid of a publicly-facing global ladder would mean that these games couldn't be competitive. I don't believe that's true. We have wildly competitive games in the physical space that don't use global ladders, and they don't suffer for it.

Global ladders are a very specific, very narrow mechanic -- they have some advantages for competitive play, and a whole lot of downsides. And we have options. At the very least, even if we do nothing else, we can shrink the size and make them regional. Or because things are digital we can throw out geography entirely and base them off clans.

Competition in small groups is often preferable to competition in large groups anyway, since that can foster rivalries, and because repeat matchups between competitive players are usually more interesting than random ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Some context. This is running through Wine (and DXVK, a DX9-11 → Vulkan layer) on Linux.

Seems EA is doing —like a lot of very lazy anti-cheats— balls-simple stack inspection. They determine whether people are cheating by looking for known signed drivers, known hardware, known bad processes and input drivers. It's cheap and scales well but it's brainless. They have to know about a hack to detect it in the future. Version checks are constantly slackened off because legitimate updates come out all the time.

Battlefield is seeing Wine and the drivers Wine reports (which are a mix of real and fake) and baulking out. It's to be expected from such plastic anti- cheat software. Many games do this.

There are better options.

CSGO's overwatch allows the community to self-moderate by _replaying_ a player's gameplay. They literally record the player's input and rebuild what the player could see in the reviewer's client. Reviewer determines whether or not their gameplay was possible. It sounds hardcore but it's simple, and adds no latency because it's done after-the-fact. Makes it super-simple to detect most wall-hacks and aim helpers.

So why isn't it everywhere? Logging data costs money. And EA, for all their moneybags are cheapskates.

And you could automate this. You could do a server-side render to determine whether or not a user is tracking players that are not physically visible to the player, or tracking impossibly tight hitboxes, or is triggering massive killcounts far too regularly (ie exploiting a bug). But that's more money.

But I'd expect a better response shouting into the wind than asking EA to be better. They're a trash company.

<comment><USER11> You are also comparing two different games in terms of popularity.

CS:GO is usually in the top 3 of most popular games on steam. Last time I checked, it was number 1. I would be surprised if Battlefield V has a quarter of the amount of players (across all platforms) versus CS:GO (which is just on PC).

I am not trying to make excuses for EA (Which has been nothing but a trash fire of a company for the last few years), but how could they justify putting those kind of resources behind a game like BFV?

<comment><USER10> CSGO is absolutely a bigger game, and there's money in it but I don't think BF's smaller scale would hinder efficacy at all. It takes a tiny fraction of players to review suspicious actions and collectively remove players from the community. This scales pretty linearly with your player count. From dozens, to millions.

Doing nothing, or doing the wrong thing has _atrocious_ effects on the community. Just read some of the other threads in this post. Seasoned players who wait weeks for flagrant cheaters to be removed. It kills a game quickly.

Maybe _that 's_ actually what EA wants.

<comment><USER12> Saving the replay costs data though. It's not only the reviewing.

<comment><USER13> We are talking a couple of hundred kB here. They store more in analytics.

<comment><USER10> For CSGO it's about 80MB/hour at 32Hz (apparently the current OW rate). Many servers run at 128Hz.

Logging a rolling week's activity at that higher rate requires 53GB but you could dramatically reduce the burden by only keeping things with in-game reports and then deleting recordings after the last issue was dealt with.

My point is it's not nothing, but it's nothing by modern standards if you've got more than two brain cells to rub together.

<comment><USER14> Then something is wrong with the logging.

If you only record player input: mouse movement, clicks and keystrokes, it should be much lower.

<comment><USER15> It's probably recording what amounts to a demo record, which basically contains everything you would need to reconstruct the player's point of view as if you were spectating them. This means the record must contain everything the server sends to that player (other players' locations, sounds, map state changes, chat, etc.).

Technically you could record only the players' inputs but to play back such a recording, you would then have to deterministically reconstruct the entire match from all players' inputs. That's a bit more complicated than just replaying the local part of the simulation that your client already does with what data the server sends to players during normal course of gameplay.

oliwarner's numbers amount to about 45 bytes per frame per player, which is not unreasonable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm part of a Battlefield V community and the state of anticheat on this game is absolutely horrific. We see players blatantly cheating for weeks, sometimes even months without getting banned. This has made one of the game modes (Firestorm) almost unplayable and drove most players away from this mode.

The shocking part is that we've compiled a list[1][2] of 380+ cheaters with video proofs and we've transmitted this list to some DICE community managers and employees. For a few months they checked this list from time to time and banned the offending people but they stopped looking at it entirely since around summer. We've tried to get in touch with other people but without any success.

The whole community is outraged by the apparent lack of care given to the cheating issues, and the fact that they seem to ignore all the reports made by the players through the platform Origin.

[1] [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/172J_dqCTZpDpOBbhgvtT...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/172J_dqCTZpDpOBbhgvtTi_cC6I_c0IHJVkfkdwmREgo/edit?usp=sharing)

[2] [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScmXAY-Q- QrfflsHrFX...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScmXAY-Q-QrfflsHrFX- pyfy1eCINCx9RCuuEOuFsYgEd1Lcg/viewform)

<comment><USER17> >sometimes even months without getting banned

Thats intentional.

Companies let detected hacks slide silently and then do waves of mass bans to prevent hackers working out what exactly triggered the ban.

That cat and mouse game has moved well beyond a simple "omg why can't ea ban this obv hack"

<comment><USER18> No. What you're talking about is deliberately ignoring evidence generated by an anti-cheat so it has time to catch more players

There are no circumstances where it makes sense to ignore player-submitted video proof of cheating. This should always be acted on quickly to reassure legitimate players and scare cheaters off.

Cheaters know there are different ways to get banned. When one gets caught rage-hacking (abusing cheats in a flagrant manner, without any effort to conceal their cheating) and they return to warn the hive, all it does is discourage other cheaters from rage-hacking. Very few cheaters will do something that they know will get them banned quickly

<comment><USER17> >No

Yes.

Google it. All the major companies do hax bans in wave patterns. Valve, blizzard etc

>There are no circumstances where it makes sense to ignore player-submitted video proof of cheating.

Agreed. Not sure why you're bring it up though. I wasnt talking about user submitted anything???

<comment><USER19> >>Not sure why you're bring it up though. I wasnt talking about user submitted anything???

Then, respectfully... what did you think you were responding to? That's pretty much entirely what the OP & thread are about :-)

<comment><USER17> >what did you think you were responding to?

The part I was quoting. OP wrote multiple paragraphs.

I mean we can argue about whether "the state of anticheat on this game is absolutely horrific" refers to automated or reports but given article I was pretty certain the section I quote was automated. Anticheat is generally not understood to mean manual reports as best as I can tell. Its the well anticheat software

Besides the Linux bans are probably not user reports Driven..

<comment><USER20> > Anticheat is generally not understood to mean manual reports as best as I > can tell. Its the well anticheat software

That's the thing though. Good games (CS comes to mind) do have some sort of ability to have human intervention.

Building a hack that can't be detected isn't easy, but it's also not _that_ hard with determination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I can only comment on this from the perspective of a very active Battlefield 1 and 5 player, the current use of cheats is pretty much an epidemic right now on all of the PC servers. There are cheat programs that you can use on the Windows clients, carpet banning based on what OS you are using is totally the wrong approach here and continues to show EA & DICE have no handle on this.

Instead of doing this, they should just add a vote to kick feature on the servers which would solve a lot of the frustration.

<comment><USER22> > they should just add a vote to kick feature on the servers

Wish this was more common. Seems to work well in all the games I've played with this feature.

<comment><USER23> It also tends to get abused against really good players. Servers need more active admins.

<comment><USER24> Team Fortress 2 is going through a nasty bot invasion right now (mostly on EU servers) and the community has been using the vote kick in a very good manner.

Most cheaters/bots are really easy to spot since they don't even try to be sneaky about it. You will see their view port instantly change, they never miss a shot, their cross hair always stays on a player model even behind wall, ...

Most people recognized the difference between a cheater and a good player fairly easily. It is even more blatant in a game like TF2 were most shots are actual projectile and not hitscan which mean that most cheater use a specific class/load out that is compatible with a basic aimbot.

Another way to see it is with cosmetics. Most cheater use throwaway account, they don't want their account with valuable items getting banned, so they only rock the basic cosmetics.

All of these combined make it so that I never saw an actual good player getting kicked. I don't know if Battlefield V has similar system, but making player care more about their account actually provide a good filter for this kinds of situations.

<comment><USER25> > Most cheaters/bots are really easy to spot since they don't even try to be > sneaky about it.

This could very well be a case of selection bias. I think there is a significant portion of cheaters who just want to get a leg up, rather than ragehack and pwn everyone.

When I was 13 trying to play CS, for example, I used a multihack with crappy 'humanizing' aimbot and wall/esp hacks. I could still barely get a kill, but it changed my gameplay experience from "run across them map, instantly die, wait for next round" to something a little more fun. I actually feel like it improved my gameplay because I could learn what to expect from other players, what routes and timings were common, faster than I could through regular play. Of course, now I would just watch demos / pro play to get the same value.

<comment><USER26> What I always did since cs 1.6 is, follow the best player and don't get in their way. They know the map layouts better than anyone. You don't have to cheat to kick it.

<comment><USER27> That and you're actively helping/backing-up an already skilled player. The definition of teamwork. Everyone plays a role, and they don't necessarily have to be rockstars to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I think the title is misleading. They are not permanently banning Linux players. Some Linux players with a certain set of software installed are being banned. They're opening cases with EA. One person confirmed their was case was not overturned and their ban stands.

The players banned are using Lutris, a third party game launcher which is likely against the TOS. I most certainly it don't agree with EA, but there's more color than flat out Linux bans.

EDIT: it also looks like they're using dkvs, the vulkan gl implementation which allows users to swap shaders which would obviously constitute cheating. Probably they caught some cheaters using dkvs, added it to the list of disallowed software without fully understanding what it was and now it's flagging a lot of false positives.

</comment><comment><USER29> Just reading through these comments, I had no idea the current state of PC gaming. Just so I have this right, you pay for a game, but you are running the entire thing locally, so your machine knows everything. Like, people behind walls, it can auto aim at people who aren't, etc. So, now you are also forced to install these spyware-like sidecars to the game that monitor you and try to figure out if you are doing any of this?

What a nightmare. I have huge cleanliness issues with my machines. I don't even like using anything that needs an installer to run, and tend to run things I don't totally understand and trust in VMs. I don't think I could do this.

<comment><USER30> > So, now you are also forced to install these spyware-like sidecars to the > game that monitor you and try to figure out if you are doing any of this?

I'm pretty sure the anti-cheat is just a library/module/etc. that's installed with the game. I can't imagine that it's a completely separate program that you install (unless it happens to be the game launcher).

<comment><USER31> They're usually shipped with the game, but often will _remain after you uninstall the game_.

Some install permanent rootkits that are completely uninstallable (see: GameGuard‡, XIGNCODE⸸, AhnLab Hackshield†)

⸸ God awful basically malware. Sends a ton of data home to bare IPs overseas. No TLS. Incredibly invasive.

† This one was particularly interesting, malware could use the rootkit to hide their files based on specific names. It is horrendously shittily written. AhnLab itself is also interesting, as the founder tried to run for president of South Korea or something, and SK either still does or used to mandate some of their "anti keylogging rootkit" software as required by law. Sends a ton of data home to bare IPs overseas. No TLS. Incredibly invasive.

‡ This does not uninstall after you uninstall the game, it runs persistently, and would make windows non-genuine or toggle on unsafe mode for unsigned force-installed ring0 drivers. Sends a ton of data home to bare IPs overseas. No TLS. Best part: did not sign version updates or demand they be higher. Cheaters could run a webserver on localhost with empty 0-byte signature detection files, and it would "patch" itself down to uselessness at launch and detect nothing. Incredibly invasive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'll never understand why people still buy EA products. They're easily among the most anti-consumer of all companies. Between their Origin client, microtransactions in AAA games, yearly releases with no appreciable changes and now shit like this I could never buy a product from them.

<comment><USER12> I enjoy the games. It is as simple as that. They are fun to play and you don't need to buy the MTXs to enjoy the game despite multiple people crying about them.

Games are also more and more expensive to develop so you kind of need to add MTX to the AAA games to cover the costs, especially when BFV didn't have any DLCs. It is not 2000's anympre.

<comment><USER33> Shouldn't really dismiss the people complaining as they are forcing EA to be less horrible to you whether you purchase the MTX or not.

> Some gamers calculated that it would take six years of playing two hours a > day to unlock all the features in Battlefront II without handing over any > real money. Paying for everything, meanwhile, would cost over $2,000.

[https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/16/technology/battlefront- ii-s...](https://money.cnn.com/2017/11/16/technology/battlefront-ii-star-wars- game-ea-costs/index.html)

<comment><USER12> But the thing is those are purely cosmetic. There's no reason why one should be able to get them for free, especially when it is a multiplayer game.

<comment><USER14> Why do you think the unlocks are purely cosmetic? You unlock better equipment characters and equipment.

So if you pay more money, you have an advantage = pay to win

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is there any more details than a couple people being banned complaining in a forum post? Cause this looks like textbook posts by people who were caught cheating.

<comment><USER35> It's probably similar to Bungie banning people playing on Linux. They count Proton/Wine as an emulator, and playing the game through an emulator is a bannable offense. The store page mentions nothing about this though, so people would try to play on Linux, get banned, and not even be able to play on Windows any more.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dcu7pb/bungie_will_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/dcu7pb/bungie_will_permanently_ban_anyone_who_plays/)

<comment><USER36> > They count Proton/Wine as an emulator, and playing the game through an > emulator is a bannable offense.

This is a misrepresentation of the Bungie issue. Users had to patch Proton itself to disable the in-game anti-cheat just to get the game to launch. Disabling anti-cheat is the bannable offense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Rant ahead:

I gave up gaming on a PC in 2013 and decided to get a PS3 instead. I did this because I got fed up with the constant upgrades (OS, drivers, game patches, etc..) that sometimes required me to spend a few hours of maintenance to play games. The only game I owned in that PS3 system was BF3! I played BF3 in the PC up until the level 70s so you probably have an idea how much fed up I felt to give up.

I feel like BF3 is the peak of the franchise. It was executed nicely in the PC as well as other console platforms. I was afraid the graphics quality would dip too much in the PS3 comparing to the PC but realize the decline is justified giving the fact that I don't have to constantly upgrade sh _t.

BF4 on the PS4 was a-okay. BF1 is just meh. BF5 is an abomination. Having played BF since 1942 in the early 2000s I am not a BF novice. But, BF5 is the worst of all.

Then, I switched to Modern Warfare 2019. Sure, the maps are smaller with 6v6 multiplayer. But, comparing to BF5 I don't have to wait 5 minutes in the lobby to play a game. And when I want to leave the game, it doesn't take another 5 minutes. The most important thing is with MW2019, I feel fun playing with my limited time available for gaming. With BF5 I feel like f_ing work and not playing game.

<comment><USER38> BF 5 is awesome on PC, especially with the Pacific maps. It definitely has some issues and a lot of people hated the 5.2 patch, but they seem to be trying to address them. I've never had an issue finding a server

<comment><USER39> Finding a breakthrough server in the US before 7pm EST is impossible, even on the weekends.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> As long as DXVK allows people to replace shaders, EA has to treat DXVK like a cheat tool.

Replacing shaders is what people use to do shady things like wallhacks, outlining moving enemies, or providing targeting data for aimbots.

<comment><USER41> Or they could just take a screenshot and check if it looks right?

<comment><USER40> Many cheating tools actually render to a secondary back-buffer. Much more convenient for the cheater, because they can even live-stream their play and everything will look clean.

It's usually not that difficult to hook the DirectX binding calls to bind an additional G-buffer, because games tend to do render to multiple G-buffer targets already for things like post-processing reflections, depth of field or motion blur. Then you patch the shaders to write the info you want/need to your new G-buffer. The game will continue to work with its (unmodified) G-buffers while you can work with your (invisible to the game) private buffer. In a gist, that's how you invisibly collect aimbot hitboxes using DXVK.

The last step then would be to smoothly nudge the player's aim onto your detected hitbox. Depending on how you do that, it may or may not be detect- able, not even to onlookers.

So the only real protection is to block the data collection in the first place, which means you need to block any kind of virtualization and any kind of 3rd party graphics API drivers, such as home-compiled DXVK binaries.

<comment><USER42> couldn't a cheater intercept their own client with a man-in-the-middle-attack, pull out the data like player positions and stuff, and simulate the game on another PC?

you could even do aimbot by finding the client's input packets and replacing them.

i suppose if the game's connection was encrypted or something you would still need to access the client PC's memory

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> The Battlefield series is a fantastic lesson in product development, especially BFV the most recent edition.

[1]: Despite being a very popular franchise and BF5 being a very popular theme (WW2) the game was received negatively from its very first trailer, in part due to a sudden focus on cosmetics and shirking of historical accuracy.

[2]: Vitriol over the trailer lead to twitter drama where the executives among other things told players not to buy the game if they didn't like it.

[3]: The development team defined a release schedule of drip feeding content over the next few years for free, instead of paid DLC. This sounds great to the user until you realize funding for future content will be predicated on launch success.

[4]: BF5 announced Firestorm, a battle-royale game mode which would be embedded inside the BF5 game. This would be the first BR mode in the series and would have the largest map ever made for a battlefield game. This mode and map would be developed by an additional studio and not eat into the development time of the original game

[5]: The game flopped at launch, EA was already having a horrific Q3 that year. The game launched with a large number of bugs, server crashes, and very few initial multiplayer maps.

[6]: Immediately after launch there was a large number of game balancing issues which the community and the game developers disagreed as to its cause. Eventually they got it right a few months later.

[7]: 5 months after launch Firestorm (the BR mode) released. It was a pretty interesting experience but guffawed in several key categories for a Battle- royale game, including horrific user interfaces and looting systems.

[8]: In order to fix issues with the initial launch of firestorm, Dice diverts resources from the main development team to work on the BR game mode.

[9]: Firestorm begins to lose player count, leading to very long queue times for players trying to play a game.

[10]: The rate of post-launch content (especially new maps) was slower than any battlefield game ever.

[11]: Unsolicited, the game developers rebalance many key weapons leading to the same large game balancing issues which has been "fixed" a year ago

[12]: Cheating issues, huge thematic settings of WW2 left out of the game, a near dead Firestorm mode, and now we can have a thread like this

\</comment><comment>-

My final take away is that this game could have been a 10/10 but was a 5/10 and a sign that publishers like EA really suck the life out of every product line they touch.

<comment><USER44> Great summary - thank you

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I am more impressed that it's actually possible to run BF5 on Linux well enough to be able to log into a multiplayer game.

<comment><USER46> Wine has come a long way in the last few years, in large part thanks to DXVK (translates DX11 to Vulkan) and Valve funding and pulling together a few Wine related projects. The vast majority of offline Windows games run well on Linux these days, even a lot of high end AAA games often run well on launch day with a relatively minor hit to performance.

Online multiplayer games are the exception, for this very reason here - anti- cheat systems. Since these are designed specifically to make sure the game is running in the exact way they were built, and often are very intrusive in looking at what's running on your system, Wine is unsurprisingly seen as something "not normal". Most games with anti-cheat won't start at all or won't let you into the online servers - this is the case with EAC and BattlEye, which are the most widely used anti-cheat these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> [https://web.archive.org/web/20200103160938/https://forums.lu...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200103160938/https://forums.lutris.net/t/ea- banning-dxvk-on-battlefield-v/7810/)

</comment><comment><USER48> Having working in the anti-cheat field, lot of people here have no ideas how it really works and the implications of banning people.

I can tell you that DICE ( Shield ~~ ) have a dedicated team of people and it's not an easy problem to solve.

</comment><comment><USER49> Game community is needing a KYC-type solution. That would require tying accounts to real identities, and if someone performs way above the field, his account is temporarily suspended, until he/she visits the authorized verification center where gaming skill can be verified by a neutral party. If a gamer can prove his skill, an account is unsuspended.

<comment><USER50> Uh a privacy nightmare (giving out your identity to a random, unaccountable company to be able to play a game? Yay what a splendid idea!) and perfect recipe for killing the game, because now you aren't punishing cheaters but anyone who is playing better than the others (for whatever reason).

So players are actually motivated to play at a mediocre/average level instead of trying to get better, because then they could stick out of the crowd and get punished/hassled.

What a wonderful thing to incentivize ... _facepalm_

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I genuinely do not understand why cheating in video games is not taken more seriously. If you go and disrupt 200 paying customers at a movie, you'll be kicked out and everyone will get refunded if your behavior is bad enough.

But if you cheat in a video game and ruin the experience for potentially _millions_ of paying customers? You might, MAYBE, get banned in a few months as part of a ban wave, but not after making thousands of dollars.

<comment><USER52> Kind of feel the opposite. It's just a game and cheating is pretty funny.

<comment><USER13> It can be funny sometimes depending on the cheater (and the cheats) but more often than not it's some preteen edgelord just ruining the game for everyone.

Air dropping a platoon of parachute equipped cows over Cherno during the zombie apocalypse? Pretty funny.

Teleporting behind the enemy team as they spawn and instantly headhotting everyone in 1/2 a second during a competitive FPS? Not fun.

When you have a couple of hours a week to play your favourite game only to have it ruined by cheaters for your entire play time it is the definition of not fun.

I have zero problem with people cheating in single player games but when you start negatively affecting others experiences that's where the line should be drawn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I wish I understood better how anti-cheat works. When anti-cheat software gets flagged while running on linux, is the cause of the flag a viable route for other cheats? I'm so unfamiliar with the mechanics of anti-cheat that I'm not even sure if I'm asking a proper question.

<comment><USER54> I'm pretty sure the mechanics of the anti-cheat are kept obscure to prevent cheat makers from adding anti-anti-cheat tech to their product.

<comment><USER55> Pretty much this, its intentionally kept as a blackbox.

<comment><USER56> Some solution are a blackbox to the game development team (and run as a post process during the game link or as a separate executable monitoring the game and system).

There is a huge and lucrative economy around cheat development that encourages a fair amount of paranoia from game developers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Vulkan being around to compete with DirectX was supposed to break down the last big barrier stopping Linux from being able to game as well as Windows. I guess that only works if game companies are willing to code up the Linux version to begin with, though.

<comment><USER58> It's more than just graphics APIs - Linux has long supported old-school OpenGL, so that wasn't really the problem.

The state of audio libraries and systems on Linux is worse and OpenAL is now proprietary. Even if you're making a desktop-environment game (E.g. using GTK without SDL) there isn't a good, widely-supported Linux API for audio.

Don't forget the other difficulties with porting Windows games (and software in general) to Linux that libraries like SDL can't help with, like file-system locations, deciding if you want to only support X or Wayland if you need window-manager integration, etc (granted, these concerns are less relevant today as games send to be filesystem-silod, single-window or exclusive-mode applications - but think about how games were in the mid-1990s with the multi- window SimCity 2000 or those desktop amusement minigames.

<comment><USER59> The difference between X and Wayland is way more than needing window-manager integration. You are forgetting that keyboard and mouse inputs run through Xorg so the problem goes way deeper.

<comment><USER60> You don't have to worry about that if you use GTK or SDL. They support both. The other really important thing in the age of console ports is support for game controllers, and that isn't handled by the display server at all. It has a separate API, which SDL provides a nice high-level interface for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Doesn't surprise me. Back in 2006 I was playing counterstrike through wine and i got banned. VAC bans are permanent so that account was gone, despite appeals. I learned my lesson, now I don't run multiplayer games through wine.

<comment><USER62> I have a weird experience when it comes to playing Counter Strike on Linux. It was back in 2004 when most non-Valve Counter Strike servers in my region(EU) used anti-cheat software called CheatingDeath. I was using Linux on my desktop for all tasks, which included playing Counter Strike, as I was a 15 year old kid. Needless to say, not only CheatingDeath did not work under Wine, it outright refused to play the game altogether, blocking the UI and informing server admins that I was cheating, which led to me getting banned. I had paid for a reserved slot on my favorite servers, so getting permanently banned was devastating. Luckily there was also cheat software called CheatingDeathDeath that emulated CheatingDeath, run perfectly fine under Wine and came with a variety of cheats built-in. It also spoofed fingerprinting part, making my machine appear as normal. So I could play CS on Linux(with actual cheats disabled) and didn't have to worry about getting banned because anti-cheat software would mark me as a false positive. Thanks, cheat developers!

P.S. I got better performance playing CS with Wine and cheat software as it didn't hog system resources so much. I recall getting a maximum of 75 FPS under Windows running genuine CheatingDeath and stable 100 FPS under Linux and CheatingDeathDeath.

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> Did EA ever officially support running on Linux? Shitty customer treatment aside, running a game on an unknown graphics stack isn't really viable to allow if you want to e.g ensure users can't replace shaders etc.

I don't think this kind of anticheat is a good idea to begin with but if you want to use it, it means that when you detect a shady stack you have to assume a user is a potential cheater.

What EA should do is just reverse the bans if players want to run them on Windows, or refund the games (Origin credit) for those that aren't interested if they can't run on Linux.

</comment><comment><USER64> Any context would be nice. This is a modified/wrapped client, right?

edit: any forums software I ever write is going to use a 'fallback to static rendering' circuit breaker setup in the case of slashdotting.

<comment><USER65> The game client would be unmodified, with it running on an API layer that maps windows system calls to to their Linux equivalents. Their ant-cheat software finds this "suspicious" and boots the players.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Honest but perhaps naive question: why is it that anti-cheat needs to be conducted through technology only? Back in the day, online communities had admins with near unlimited power (I'm thinking IRC and community Counter- Strike servers) and they solved that problem proactively.

EA could have a few employees do this work but also let such employees appoint long-standing, well known community members have a limited set of powers to act upon the most blatant offenders in real time. Similar to how IRC had network and channel OPs

<comment><USER67> One reason is that volunteers in these moderation positions begin to see it as a symbol of status and the power goes to their heads. About this time last year, Digital Extremes had to pretty much fire all of the Warframe chat moderators for abusing their power.

There's also the issue of scale. Back in the day, online communities were much smaller. There were fewer online gamers, and network latency often restricted the range of a community geographically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Yeah? And? Battlefield V multiplayer is an online service. You either use the configuration supported by the service provider or expect to get btfo'd.

</comment><comment><USER69> Apex Legends, a property from Respawn Entertainment though technically under the EA/Origin umbrella, has a different approach on cheating by using a combination of deep learning from previous matches and shadow-banning cheaters to play among themselves. I've yet to encounter identifiable cheating since the start of the second season (mid 2019)

<comment><USER70> I don't know what level you're playing at, but at the Diamond+ level, I run into cheaters almost every night. They're blatant and 30s of spectating will prove that. I also watch a lot of pro streams and they have the same experience.

</comment></comment><comment> GuB-42 I don't think that Linux is the problem. Companies don't like banning players, that's lost revenue and bad press.

I suspect that a lot of cheaters use Linux as a cover up. In fact, if I wanted to cheat, I would do exactly that. Not only the more open nature of Linux makes it harder to detect cheats but it also gives me a reason to complain.

So I'm sure there are false positives for Linux gamers (it has happened), but I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority were actual cheaters.

And BTW, why play Battlefield V on Linux? Maybe I am wrong but from a technical perspective, it is a lot of hassle just to avoid running Windows, and performance is likely to be worse. And from a philosophical perspective, Battlefield V and EA are not exactly in line with the ideals of free software, so if that's your reason for not using Windows, why are you giving your money to EA?

<comment><USER41> Primarily, I run games on linux because I'm already on linux and rebooting is a pain if I have a lot of things open.

Performance on Linux is often as good as or better than windows. Linux as an OS is just plain faster, so that's fighting with whatever performance penalty is introduced by translation layers like wine/dxvk. These days it's usually not much hassle to run things on linux... certainly less than rebooting for a commonly used item.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I'd love them to switch to a paid subscription model, like WoW.

Would help them justify the long tail of updates, patches, etc. and make a ban easier to enforce - block the cheater's credit card.

Make it a premium service for all I care, with premium only servers. Origin Premium doesn't do crap.

<comment><USER72> You can get prepaid debit cards in many countries, and many banks (especially modern, mobile-based) offer disposable virtual debit cards.

They could require debit/credit cards backed by a bank account (not completely sure how those differ to disposable/prepaid ones), but that would prevent some legitimate users from buying the subscription.

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> It's been a really really long time since EA last made a game I enjoyed. Like the Command and Conquer series, even Generals and Zero Hour, as much as they were a departure from the "real" C&C series.

I wonder if there'll ever be such a time as the nineties when it comes to new interesting game genres.

Nowadays it's just same FPS games with different graphics. Monorail with quick time events or battlefields of some sort. And of course same golden goose EA sports games every year. Cookie cutter.

Or maybe new interesting games come out all the time and I'm just too old.

<comment><USER74> Stop paying attention to the AAA industry that's making the compost you accurately describe. Indie is where all the innovation is any more, and has been for a good few years now.

<comment><USER75> I agree with your post, but describing it as "indie" is weird as there is a huuuuge market of non-AAA that is not indie, and yet that market also produces interesting and innovative games.

There are over 30,000 games on Steam. If you ignore the AAA publishers you'll find tons of excellent games regardless of indie status.

<comment><USER76> Yeah, a lot of "indie" studios today are as big as Westwood was when it made Command & Conquer.

<comment><USER77> I've started noticing people call a game "AA" lately to distinguish a big- budget independently produced game from big-budget titles coming from traditional publishers. Not sure if that one will take off or not...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are there any cases of games banning people using virtual machines with videocard passthrough?

I was strongly considering going this route but kinda worried game developers will start cracking down on it.

</comment><comment><USER78> Talking about Battlefield V cheaters on consoles...

Now there's a ridiculous amount of players using those chronusmax/titan two/strikepack devices that modify the input of real controllers and do things like anti-recoil, rapid fire, auto burst, drop shoot, quickscope, etc.

Wallhacks and autoaim are obvious (and, luckly, not common on consoles), but those devices are getting very popular and they provide subtle ways of cheating that are harder to detect.

<comment><USER39> I have never heard of this before. Very interesting

<comment><USER78> it's so bad that some players are recording lives with a camera pointing to their controls to show that they are not using it (they all require cable)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Some businesses targeting the mainstream market seem to actively sabotage users on minority platforms. I wonder how much they get paid by Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER80> Do these same customers intend on buying the next EA product? I bet they probably will. Regardless of how loud they protest now. I feel that the game playing public doesn't find EA reprehensible _enough_ to let it impact their future sales.

Other industries have customers drop them for a decade or permanently. "I'll never shop here again" is something people actually say.

So strange.

</comment><comment><USER81> That their anti-cheat software is able to detect this is a good thing. So many games are ruined by cheaters and bots. In this case, I don't think the intent was to ban Linux players; rather their anti-cheat software detects any sort of virtualization of video or input devices, because that could facilitate cheating software. It likely can't tell the difference between harmless virtualization and the injection of cheating software.

I sympathize with Linux gamers, as I wish I could game from Linux. I'm typing this from Windows right now, and the only reason I ever run Windows is to play games. I don't like dual booting—and Linux runs so amazingly-well in Hyper-V—that I'm fine having Windows as my primary OS (at home, anyway).

That EA's software can't tell the difference is annoying. Their PR response and lack of clarity is annoying. If, for technical reasons, they can't secure the Linux-emulated version, they should make it clear that Linux isn't supported, and offer refunds to the (surely tiny number of) people who bought it for Linux play. If the number of Linux users is large enough, they should create a proper Linux port themselves.

In summary, I sympathize with their goals regarding cheat prevention. It's not like someone at EA said "I hate Linux, let's accuse them of cheating and ban their accounts!" This is a technical problem and a minor PR failure. A reasoned response is atypical from gamers who feel slighted, though, so I don't expect one.

<comment><USER82> > That their anti-cheat software is able to detect this is a good thing.

No, it's not a good thing. If a website did it we would call it invasive tracking. And you didn't even pay for a website, unlike the game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> I'm getting the feeling reading this thread that gaming may have replaced porn as the internet use spurring the most rapid innovation. Is this an accurate assessment? I'm not involved with either, but in the very early days it was the adult industry that solved problems of massive use and payments etc.

<comment><USER84> Replaced? Don't make me laugh. Gaming has always been bigger.

<comment><USER85> Gaming on the web was tiny til broadband became mainstream. There were lots of dial-up services (DJANGO, MSN gaming, etc) but latencies over the web were not so great. I remember getting pings of 700+ trying to play Jedi Knight deathmatch on AOL

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> :D only multi player games u should play is where players are admin on their own server. :') companies don't give a shit as long as sales are up. stop playing if it's so horrific and move to a proper game. then maybe battlefield XVIII will be playable.

</comment><comment><USER87> Challenge for Linux users, make an open source better anti-cheat for Linux than in Windows that connects to the Linux kernel through a kmod to inspect the whole stack.

Then Linux would be a better gaming platform than Windows. In many ways it is already better.

<comment><USER88> Wouldn't help here, this is a Windows game being run under wine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> I visited major bank websites on Linux but I couldn't login and got the error "agent not supported". Why do banks prevent logins from Linus even though I am using Google Chrome. Can someone please tell why this happens.

<comment><USER90> The browser sends a UA string to the website in every http request in which the OS you have is indicated.

[https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user- agent](https://www.whatismybrowser.com/detect/what-is-my-user-agent)

<comment><USER89> Thank you. However, why do the bank websites allow Google Chrome on windows but do not allow Google Chrome on Linux.

<comment><USER90> It's hard to say without knowing more about the website. Some desktop features such as pepperflash were never ported to Android chrome however it's more likely a business decision to push mobile users to use their dedicated app.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER91> After the flop that was BF5 I don't expect EA to be putting much effort into anything other than keeping some servers up so they can pump and dump BF6 on whoever is dumb enough to buy it.

</comment><comment><USER92> Honestly that's rather expected from EA :D

</comment><comment><USER93> I see no information on this 10 post thread that they are "banning Linux players". I just see a few people saying they weren't cheating who got banned.

A little Occam's razor here implies it's just a few people who got caught cheating and won't admit it.

<comment><USER94> It could be either. It's not at all far-fetched that the anti-cheat looks at it's environment and realizes that things ARE NOT normal - different tricks and layers are used to make the game run at all.

Then again you could certainly be right, and it's just a few cheaters crying trying to cause a fuss to get unbanned.

<comment><USER93> As the original admin for the Steam forums at launch and an active participant there for years, I have seen my share of " I'm innocent!" cheater posts. That's a lot of the basis of my opinion on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> I'm not buying, playing, pirating or otherwise touching EA products on any platform since 2011 (or 2012) and recommend you do the same. This is truly anti-consumer company and it deserves to die forgotten in a ditch.

</comment><comment><USER96> Start disputing credit card charges involving EA and watch how fast they start talking to the player base.

They cannot easily outsource employees to deal with that.

<comment><USER85> Or, they ban your entire account because you contested a charge

Game companies don't fuck around with chargebacks

<comment><USER96> This is true...

There are a few that will never accept you as a customer again if you do a chargeback (Arenanet comes to mind). However, with EA, that would probably make me happy.

<comment><USER85> My original Xbox Live account was banned permanently because I thought it'd be easier to do a chargeback than cancel my subscription and ask for a refund of the most recent billing cycle

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER97> I mean the first mistake is paying EA anything. That company is a plague.

</comment><comment><USER98> in which a new generation relearns that if you are not paying a subscription you are a center of cost

</comment><comment><USER99> People still buy EA games?!?!

</comment><comment><USER100> aaaa

</comment><comment><USER101> If you aren't playing for money, why does anti-cheat matter?

Just use ELO matchmaking and/or play with friends.

<comment><USER54> It's not so much fun when you're getting sniped from across the map beyond your draw distance the instant you spawn by some dude who isn't even looking in your direction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> I added EA to the 'ignore all their products' list 10 years ago. Nothing since then has made me feel this was a poor decision.

<comment><USER103> Same. And it's a shame too - the new Jedi game looks really nice. But it's got that scarlet EA on it, and that's an automatic no from me.

Stories like these reassure me that my boycotting is justified.

<comment><USER104> it is a really fun game, in spite of EA.

just pirate it, or buy a used physical copy.

<comment><USER102> I watched someone play it on the hardest difficulty, which plays like Jedi Dark Souls. It didn't look like a game with any real replay-ability. I find catching those games on twitch is way more fun than playing them myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER105> PSA: the original, Battlefield 1942, is still alive and well, and Linux players are welcome.

About 20 players/night at 7PM PST join on EA117 server. It plays the "desert combat" mod — the makers of that mod were acquihired by DICE to make BF2. ea117.com/access

It's also really easy to reinstall... [http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setu...](http://www.mediafire.com/file/v2dj55nwoxz84o8/BF1942DCF_setup.exe) If you're lazy.</comment>


You don't need a coding bootcamp - <AUTHOR> https://den.dev/blog/bootcamps/ <comment><USER2> You don't _need_ a coding bootcamp, but they can be a hell of a way to focus the mind. Yes, you can learn a lot of the coding skills individually, but a bootcamp will instil much of that knowledge in a very concentrated period of time, in a manner that leaves you open to more without becoming dogmatised in a particular way of doing things and - get this - involves doing it with other people. That means you're ready to enter Agile teams if you so wish.

Also, absolutely no-one coming out of a bootcamp would say they're ready for a senior or even mid-level developer job. Categorically no-one. I have no idea where the author got that sentiment.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've commented on boot camps before.

They are recruitment 2.0, in which they are trying to farm developers. A lot of the bootcamps in the UK have deals with big firms to allocate X developers per cohort to them.

Its a great business model, people pay them to essentially be motivated to learn publically accessible data, then they get some "help" finding a dev job. Then the hiring company pays the bootcamp a fee as well.

Not great for existing developers who then spend time babysitting the bootcampers, who I would say require more effort and time than graduates or juniors.</comment>


Scientific proof: Nobody hates hipsters more than hipsters - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.westword.com/showandtell/2010/09/scientific_proof_nobody_hates.php <comment><USER2> I was a hipster before it was cool.

The article basically states what we already know. They hate to think of themselves as pop-culture pawns.</comment>


Ask HN: Best chair for extended reading? (Not at a desk) - <AUTHOR> I'm seeking advice for a good chair to read in - one that is good for the body (no negative impact / limited aches and pains). I use a standing desk or an aeron chair normally at my battle station, alternating between the two. However, when I want to do extended reading my sofa / couch just isn't cutting it from a comfort perspective and ergonomic perspective.<p>What does HN recommend when it comes to 'lean back' reading ? <comment><USER2> Eames chair</comment>


Ask HN: What are your go to SaaS products for startups/MVPs? - <AUTHOR> Looking for some inspiration. Ive done a lot of MVPs/Early-stage apps over the years and I tend to lean on the same SaaS portfolio for mails, text gateways, payment etc, but Im sure Ive missed a few valuable additions.<p>Here's a few I use: Mails: Mailchimp / Mandrill Payment: Paylike
Search: Algolia <comment><USER2> [https://StackShare.io](https://StackShare.io) and [https://FounderKit.com](https://FounderKit.com) are great places to find reviews of SaaS services:

> _mails,_

[https://founderkit.com/growth-marketing/email- marketing/revi...](https://founderkit.com/growth-marketing/email- marketing/reviews)

[https://stackshare.io/email-marketing](https://stackshare.io/email-marketing)

[https://zapier.com/learn/email-marketing/](https://zapier.com/learn/email- marketing/)

> _text gateways,_

[https://founderkit.com/apis/sms/reviews](https://founderkit.com/apis/sms/reviews)

[https://stackshare.io/voice-and-sms](https://stackshare.io/voice-and-sms)

> _payments_

[https://founderkit.com/apis/credit-card- processing/reviews](https://founderkit.com/apis/credit-card- processing/reviews)

[https://stackshare.io/payment-services](https://stackshare.io/payment- services)

Both have categories:

[https://stackshare.io/categories](https://stackshare.io/categories)

[https://founderkit.com/reviews](https://founderkit.com/reviews)

<comment><USER3> If you're looking for market/competition research, I'd recommend [https://coscout.com](https://coscout.com) as well, for info about companies, funding, competitors, tech stack etc

It's in alpha right now, so you'll have to get in the waitlist, though they're only a few weeks away from launching AFAIK.

Full disclosure: A friend of mine is building this :)

<comment><USER2> Long term viability of SaaS solutions is definitely worth researching.

Is this something that's going to get acquired and be extinguished?

What are our switching costs?

How do we get our data in a format that can be: read into our data warehouse/lake and imported into an alternate service if necessary in the future?

How does Coscout compare to e.g. Crunchbase, PitchBook (Morningstar), YCharts, AngelList?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> For PhotoStructure, I'm using

* GitHub and GitLab for private and public repos

* Just switched from GitLab CI to GitHub Actions (as self-hosted runners, especially on Windows, can be flaky)

* MailChimp (free tier)

* Drift for chat support (generous free tier)

* Braintree (similar functionality to Stripe, but also includes PayPal)

* Cloudflare proxying a Digital Ocean droplet running nginx serving a Hugo-built static website

* Sentry.io for error reporting (again, generous free tier, and open source)

* Twilio for an extremely cheap toll-free number

* G suite for email/docs

* Clerky for corporate setup

* Todoist for shared lists

<comment><USER5> Exiftool vendored is excellent thank you!

</comment></comment><comment> timothy-quinn Mailchimp & Sendgrid for mail (I like MC for campaigns, but SG for API call driven messages).

Firebase for hosting/serverless funcs.

G Suite for collaboration.

Bitbucket for Repos (they had better enterprise-y tools for free, not sure if Github now is at parity).

Notion for task lists and product specs.

Stripe for payments.

Twilio for SMS.

Cloudflare for caching/DNS.

</comment><comment><USER6> All in on AWS for BE. Just about everything you need is there for free or close to free. Netlify for FE hosting just because it's so easy to tie up to Github. Retool for ops. Metabase for BI. Seed for Serverless CI/CD.

<comment><USER7> What kind of things are you doing in Retool for ops?

<comment><USER6> We're pretty new to it but anything and everything ops related is running through it with minimal effort –

* Lookup various account types and see all relationships

* Editing accounts

* Changing permissions and verifying accounts

* Uploading logos to S3

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For my one-woman-band projects I use:

Github for repos and static hosting Gandhi for domains S3 & Cloudfront for assets Fortrabbit or Digital Ocean also for hosting Runway for ML and hosted models Algolia for search Snipcart and Stripe for payments Trello for project management Whereby for client video calls Twilio for a phone number Google suite generally for admin and presentations etc Typeform for forms Waveapps for accounting

</comment><comment><USER9> So, not a SaaS itself, but I am working on a JavaScript SaaS starter kit, if you're looking for another tool to have in your belt. Instead of writing all the common code (user authentication/management, subscriptions, build systems, design systems) for your app yourself, Nodewood ([https://nodewood.com](https://nodewood.com)) starts you off with all that written by someone for whom it is the main focus, not a secondary one.

Perhaps closer to your original ask, here's the SaaS tools I tend to lean on:

\- For hosting, I like Linode ([https://www.linode.com/](https://www.linode.com/)). Decent VPS prices and they keep increasing the value you get for the same price.

\- For analytics, I like Clicky ([https://clicky.com/](https://clicky.com/)). Less intrusive than Google Analytics and a simpler interface.

\- For email, Mailgun ([https://www.mailgun.com/pricing/](https://www.mailgun.com/pricing/)). They're more focused on transactional email, not marketing email, which is a subtle difference, but can be worth it depending on what you're doing.

\- Stripe ([https://stripe.com/](https://stripe.com/)) is still king for payments. Their API sets the standard.

</comment><comment><USER10> Metabase for data analysis. Admittedly not a service, but more than worth running a docker container yourself since it's FREE.

</comment><comment><USER11> For [https://calenduck.co](https://calenduck.co) (built with Django) we use:

[https://dashboard.heroku.com/](https://dashboard.heroku.com/) for the infra

[https://www.sendinblue.com](https://www.sendinblue.com) for emails

[https://sentry.io](https://sentry.io) for error reporting

[https://stripe.com](https://stripe.com) for payments

[https://papertrailapp.com/](https://papertrailapp.com/) for logging

[https://slack.com](https://slack.com) (free) for chat

[https://trello.com](https://trello.com) (free) for keeping track of things

Totaling at 14$ a month, it doesn't really get any cheaper

</comment><comment><USER12> All my products mostly start with these list of essential services, but can do away with the free plans until the product grows.

* Github for repositories (Free) * Namecheap for DNS * Zoho for emails (free for 5 email accounts) * Mailgun for emails (1250 emails per month free) * Trello for project management (free) * Airbrake for error monitoring (7.5 errors per month free) * Tawk.to for customer support contact form (free) * Netlify for frontend hosting (free) * Cloudflare for CDN (free) * Hetzner for servers. (this is the only paid service :), but its only $2.70 per month for a 1Vcpu 2GB ram vps) * Paddle for payments (they take 5% cut which is very reasonable for the services they offer)

This stack pretty much allows me to just invest "time" into a project and get it out, before scaling it.

</comment><comment><USER13> Highly recommend

\- [https://simpleanalytics.com](https://simpleanalytics.com) -> Simple, clean, and privacy-friendly analytics

\- [https://wip.chat](https://wip.chat) -> it's a community of makers who help each other ship products.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've been an indie-hacker for a decade and personally the biggest win by a country mile is Heroku (platform as a service).

Even though I'd consider myself good with linux etc., I still love Heroku because it's a massive time and stress saver not to have to deal with most deployment issues myself.

</comment><comment><USER15> Here's what I use for my app [https://songrender.com](https://songrender.com):

\- DigitalOcean for servers/load balancer/database/object storage

\- Netlify for the frontend and marketing site

\- Cloudflare for CDN and DNS

\- Stripe for payment processing

\- Postmark for transactional emails

\- Papertrail for logging

\- Sentry for error tracking

\- Fathom for analytics

\- StatusCake for uptime monitoring

\- GitLab for code hosting

\- Trello for project management

</comment><comment><USER16> Zoho One - One platform for all your business needs. CRM, Mail, Finance, Support, Marketing, HR, Office Suite, Chat, Project Management, Business Intelligence, Custom Solutions, etc.

[https://www.zoho.com/one/](https://www.zoho.com/one/)

NB: I work for Zoho.

<comment><USER17> Having used Zoho for 3 years, I can say that Zoho is nice because it's cheap, but you get what you pay for. It feels like the less-good version of G Suite in almost every way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> In [https://getprobe.io](https://getprobe.io) (built in Ruby) we use:

AWS (RDS, S3, ECS, EC2)

[https://www.mailgun.com](https://www.mailgun.com) for emails

[https://rollbar.com](https://rollbar.com) for error reporting

[https://stripe.com](https://stripe.com) for payments

[https://gsuite.google.com](https://gsuite.google.com) for email, calendar, sheets

[https://slack.com](https://slack.com) (free) for chat

[https://trello.com](https://trello.com) (free) for keeping track of things

</comment><comment><USER19> Netlify/Vercel for static site hosting, intercom for chat, SendGrid for mail sending, Ably for pub/sub real-time messaging (yes I'm from ably.com!), paddle for subscriptions as opposed to stripe...

</comment><comment><USER20> I'm a PM at a startup and have to quickly spin up integration mvps. I've found pipedream very handy! [http://pipedream.com/](http://pipedream.com/)

<comment><USER21> This looks like an exact clone of [https://stdlib.com](https://stdlib.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I've used slides2video.com before to make explainer videos and walkthroughs straight from my Google Slides presentations. It can be a bit rough around the edges, but it works great.

</comment><comment><USER23> I recommend my own self-hosted analytics tool (I know, right...), [https://userTrack.net](https://userTrack.net)

It has everything you need to quickly iterate over your website (analytics, segments, heatmaps, session recordings and, coming soon: A/B tests). Privacy benefits aside, I think it's way faster to have everything in one dashboard instead of having to go to Google Analytics, than to Hotjar than to some other tool.

</comment><comment><USER24> I share all tools (and their costs) I use to run my SaaS publicly: [https://tryhexadecimal.com/running-costs](https://tryhexadecimal.com/running- costs)

Roughly speaking:

* AWS for servers/database/CDN (because I have credits)

* Netlify for static site hosting & forms

* Cloudflare for DNS/domains

* Fastmail for email

* Redis Cloud for managed Redis hosting

* Stripe for billing/payments/company incorporation

* Sentry for exception tracking

* Twilio for SMS notifications

* Sendgrid for transactional email

* Tarsnap for backups

</comment><comment><USER25> For [https://stackprint.io](https://stackprint.io) I'm using:

* GitLab for private repositories and CI (free)

* GitHub for public repositories (free)

* AWS for serverless backend & frontend hosting (free so far)

* Notion for milestones, sprint planning and notes (free)

* MailChimp for email campaigns and CRM (free)

* Webflow for landing page & blog

* Docusaurus for documentation, in progress

* Plausible for analytics

* Office 365 for email and documents

* Stripe for payments

<comment><USER26> Any particular reason for separate Gitlab and GitHub?

<comment><USER25> I started out with GitLab for their free CI and multiple private repos before both was available on GitHub.

I'm mostly using GitHub to share code examples as people are just more familiar with it. With GitHubs current offering I might completely switch in the not too distant future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I saw [http://viable.fit/](http://viable.fit/) on Twitter today!

<comment><USER28> You don't see a lot of purple web sites. Worth visiting just for that experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Stripe for payments, AWS Elastic Beanstalk for hosting/deployments.

Wish there was an even dumber alternative to Beanstalk. I've been tempted to build my own thing to get closer to my ideal of uploading a jar and forgetting about it.

(Raw javascript / vertx / postgres for actual development, but these aren't SaaS)

<comment><USER30> CapRover can accept any docker file (or a zip file with a .captain file). You can provision most databases and external self hosted services on a simple UI.

I self host it on a $5 droplet.

<comment><USER29> Well the pitch is certainly good. I'll look into it, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Hosting: DigitalOcean

Emails: Mailchimp (marketing), Sendgrid (transactional)

Development: Github, Bitbucket, Trello

Payments: Stripe (I've seen people try to cheap out on payments gateways, it's always a big, costly mistake. Choose a good one)

I have a question to people using things like CloudFlare, S3 etc. for early stage apps and MVP's: why?

<comment><USER32> Cloudflare = free/cheap global CDN, free worker, and free WAF.

Also: As a member of the Bandwidth Alliance, DigitalOcean waives egress fees to transfer data to Cloudflare, effectively creating a zero-cost data bridge from DigitalOcean to Cloudflare's global network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> For [https://keycombiner.com](https://keycombiner.com) I am using:

Development & Project management:

\- GitLab

\- Notion

\- Sentry

Hosting:

\- PythonAnywhere (Makes hosting a django application very simple!:))

\- Cloudflare (Free tier already works great for caching purposes)

Mail:

\- Mailgun

Payments:

\- [https://paddle.com/](https://paddle.com/) (to handle sales tax on top of stripe)

</comment><comment><USER34> For [https://PerfBeacon.com](https://PerfBeacon.com) I'm using:

\- Chat window: Crisp

\- Email Newsletter/Transactional: Mailgun/Mailchimp

\- Payments: Stripe

\- Hosting: AWS Lambda / API Gateway / CloudFront / S3

\- Code: GitHub

\- CI: CircleCI

\- Task management: Trello

<comment><USER35> Hey, the end of your logo is clipped on Firefox:

[https://imgur.com/pZPmlR2](https://imgur.com/pZPmlR2)

I tried it with a totally clean Firefox and with Chromium (both Linux) - Chromium is fine, Firefox is clipped.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Question for the HN crowd - seems like people doing any sort of self promotion on these types of questions inevitably get downvoted. Is there a stated rule against it or is it just generally not appreciated?

<comment><USER37> Guidelines[0]

> Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and > comment when they run across something they find interesting—not for > promotion.

There are some situations where a well crafted Ask or Show HN would qualify as self promotion. I'm not a moderator so I don't know how the rules are interpreted day to day.

[0][https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Here is a list of apps we use to run our marketing team : [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23154800](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23154800)

</comment><comment><USER39> # GitHub and Bitbucket for private and public repos

# Sendgrid (mails and campaigns)

# Slack for team chats

# 2Checkout for payment

# GA for analytics

# Trello for team tasks

# G suite for email and drive

# Postman for automated API tests

# Datadog for monitoring and tracing

# SonarQube for code quality assessment

# AWS as cloud provider

# Microtica for automation and software delivery

</comment><comment><USER40> Recent YC company that does SaaS reviews for startups: [https://satchel.com](https://satchel.com)

Not associated with them, but I found their comparisons helpful!

</comment><comment><USER41> shameles plug - founder of myzel.io here - we're about to launch a platform that combines all the things you need as a startup in one platform.

As a simple example: Your startup is about tracking corona infections? You'll get the service built (no dev/design team needed), you'll get the services you need integrated (let's say kafka cluster, push notifications, analytics dashboard) and we host, monitor and scale it. All you need is an idea!

Love to see you all posting your favorite services. Following this

<comment><USER41> I see people signing up - unfortunately this is pre-mvp for until next monday. Happy if you reach out to email@example.com for more info, pricing, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Twilio, Datadog, Splunk, Zoom, Envoy, Lever, Slack, PagerDuty, Mode, JIRA, Box, Airtable, readme.io

<comment><USER43> I know Datadog has the risk of being very expensive.

<comment><USER44> It is the modern world of SaaS. If your margins are not super hight you are out.

<comment><USER45> Did you mean high or tight?

<comment><USER44> Sorry, high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> [https://www.revenuecat.com](https://www.revenuecat.com) (YC S18)

API to manage In app subscriptions. I think it qualifies since it's free up to 10K$ MTR.

Disclaimer: I work at RevenueCat, not in the mobile side of things although if I were to start a mobile app with subscriptions, after seeing how painful is to get it right, I for sure would use them.

</comment><comment><USER47> Mailchimp, Firebase for hosting, GSuite for collaboration. Stripe for payments.

</comment><comment><USER48> Postmark/Sendgrid for emails

Digital Ocean or Heroku for hosting

Skylight for application monitoring

Sentry for error tracking

Cloudflare for caching

S3 for storage

<comment><USER49> Any specific reason for S3 instead of Spaces given you're on Digital Ocean already?

<comment><USER50> Not op, but for now spaces are lacking detailed stats, one example, if you want to build a saas and bill your users for the bandwidth consumed by their buckets you can't do that right now using spaces.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Surprised not to see Zendesk here seems lots of people are using them...

</comment><comment><USER51> Auth0 for user sign up and authorization. AWS for everything else

</comment><comment><USER52> A few weeks ago I heard of this tool called saasify (.sh),it aims at making the process of building SaaS faster. I haven't used it personally but I wonder if anyone reading the comments did and what are your thoughts? Is it worth getting into it?

</comment><comment><USER53> \- Logdna for logs \- rsync.net for backups and S3 "gateway"

</comment><comment><USER54> Twilio for international SMS and more GSM related stuff.

<comment><USER30> Twilio for calling and SMS as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> \- Discord (free) for chat

\- sendinblue.com (free) for newsletter

\- GSuite for emails

\- OVH for hosting

</comment><comment><USER56> My favourite stack at the moment for fast MVPs:

* Frontend with Angular deployed on Netlify on git push to the production branch

* AWS Lambda + API Gateway via Serverless and Nest.js for API endpoints

* Airtable API for recording data (under 1000 records = free)

* For larger database needs, I set up postgres, mongo, or I use DynamoDB

* SendGrid for transactional emails

* MailChimp for marketing emails

* Mollie for payments

* Matomo deployed on a DigitalOcean droplet for GDPR-proof analytics

* Zapier for all kinds of automated workflows

* Trello for project management

</comment><comment><USER21> Give us a try if you need text to speech:

[https://narrationbox.com](https://narrationbox.com)

<comment> ryan-allen Heyo! I signed up, just a heads up that the verification email went to my spam folder. You may be able to somehow improve your reputation so they get through. I marked it 'not spam' to help, though!

<comment><USER21> Thanks for the heads-up! Really appreciate it.</comment></comment></comment>


ArchiveTeam Works Hard to Avert isoHunt Data Massacre - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/archiveteam-works-hard-to-avert-isohunt-data-massacre-131020/

<comment><USER2> Hello, I am taking part of this operation since the beginning and have been heavily donating resources. However, the real bottleneck are IP ADDRESSES. Isohunt throttles by IP addresses, so far I have for example contributed 512 IPs but we still need more to archive all of it! You can view the status at [http://tracker.archiveteam.org/isoprey/](http://tracker.archiveteam.org/isoprey/) and run your own downloader using our own script available here: [https://github.com/joepie91/isohunt- grab](https://github.com/joepie91/isohunt-grab) If you have any questions or want to have a talk with the team of this operation, feel free to join #isoprey on EFNet (IRC)

Regards, "Frost"

<comment><USER3> I'll add another 40 IPs to the mix tomorrow</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Suggestions for SaaS notification platform for use with Cordova - <AUTHOR>

I've got an app built in Cordova and am looking into different providers for push notifications. I've tried using Parse but all the Cordova plugins I tried we're awful and I couldn't get it up and running properly.
I'd like something that would manage the UDID's itself so we don't need to. Urban Airship isn't bad, but it's very expensive ($250 a month for the entry plan). I've also looked at Pushwoosh, but it requires us to manage the UDID's ourselves.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. <comment><USER2> You may want to check out ionic push - [http://blog.ionic.io/announcing-ionic- push-alpha/](http://blog.ionic.io/announcing-ionic-push-alpha/)</comment>


Africa's anti-Hummer - <AUTHOR> http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/africa/130213/africa-mobius-car-truck-roads-infrastructure-business

<comment><USER2> After Toyota axed their Toyota FJ40 Landcruiser manufacturing lines in Japan, they started building the Landcruiser under the model name "Bandeirante" in Brazil. Just a few years ago they axed the line again in Brazil. Maybe its time to open up the line again in Africa. That continent needs that vehicle, which has always been one of the most reliable you can find (a friend of mine has one with 450k+ miles on it)

</comment><comment><USER3> That looks really cool. Of course there's absolutely no hope of importing one to the USA, but it seems like it'd be a really fun vehicle for banging around in the Mountain West...

I really appreciate that kind of simple, rugged, democratic engineering.</comment>


ICANN reveals objections to proposed top level domains - <AUTHOR> http://www.pcworld.com/article/2016559/icann-reveals-objections-to-proposed-top-level-domains.html

<comment><USER2> Actual list is available here

<https://gacweb.icann.org/display/gacweb/GAC+Early+Warnings>

Looking through, the first thing that I noticed is the number of domains rejected by Australia, looking through the PDFs the reasons all seem valid, it's just strange that Australia is the one rejecting them.

<comment><USER3> Interesting:

-Argentina and Chile object to Patagonia Inc's attempt at .patagonia

-India objects to .bible

-Nigeria objects to Delta Airlines attempt at .delta

-China objects to .shangrila from some hotel chain by the same name

-Australia objects to most everything else including .sucks

<comment><USER4> > Australia objects to most everything else including .sucks

It's important to note that this isn't because it offends them, but because whoever holds it can basically print cash once brands start realizing they need to register (brand).sucks before anyone else does.

<comment><USER3> Fair enough. They appear to object with 1 of following 2 reasons:

1) _Company X does not appear to specify sufficient mechanisms to allow communities to protect their names and reputations from misuse at the second level, except through defensive registrations._

or

2) _Company X is proposing to exclude any other entities, including potential competitors, from using the TLD.

Restricting common generic strings for the exclusive use of a single entity could have unintended consequences, including a negative impact on competition._

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gotta say I have to give props to Australia for objecting to most of these. Some relevant reading:

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120613/12491719310/rip- of...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120613/12491719310/rip-off- highlights-top-level-domain-scrum.shtml)

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121116/02455021073/domain...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121116/02455021073/domain- shakedown-companies-warned-about-dangers-unprotected-sx.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER6> Seeing a common theme in the LLC applicants whose generic choices of profession-related words Australia has objected to...

      Delta Mill, LLC
      Snow Sky, LLC
      Koko Moon, LLC
      Atomic Pipe, LLC
      Corn Sunset, LLC
      Dog Bloom, LLC
      Hidden Way, LLC
      Knob Town, LLC
      Spring Frostbite, LLC
      Victor North, LLC
      Blinky Sky, LLC

and so on. Did someone actually get a random name generator and then register all those shell companies?

</comment><comment><USER7> Three cheers for Australia! I think our experience with the last set of TLDs show us that having more isn't necessarily better. Think of how many domains you'll need to capture to protect your brand (Australia's main objection).

I think the other way around this is to boycott the new TLDs ... if anyone wants to collaborate on a couple browser plug-ins I'd be more than happy to help.

<comment><USER8> Why would I care about owning all the (brand).(tld) pages? If I own .com, it's enough. If someone is trying to be my brand without my permission, there are already legal ways of dealing with that. If they're just another brand in a different space of the market with the same name, I don't care. Apple the tech company is quite different from Apple the apple company. If someone makes (brand).sucks, that's really no different to (brand)sucks.com.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Can someone cross reference this to the list of gTLD that were initially submitted? To see what ones weren't objected to?

<comment><USER10> This is the rough list of domains that no one objected to:

<https://gist.github.com/4145536>

I didn't find a nicely formatted CSV of complaints, all I had was the page itself, which I pasted into a spreadsheet and extracted a list from that (the HTML wasn't consistently formatted either or I would've done something with that) I did find a CSV of domain proposals here: [http://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/reveal/strings...](http://newgtlds.icann.org/sites/default/files/reveal/strings-1200utc-13jun12-en.csv)

I did some processing on both to get them to all lower case, removed spaces and translations as best I could, and ran cat (both files) | sort | uniq -c over both of them, at which point, any line that starts with " 1 " is a line that only appears in one file. So, the list I gisted is "mostly" domains that no one complained about, but it may also contain domains that someone complained about that weren't actually proposed, and several steps along the way were error prone so it definitely has other mistakes. The domains with non-latin characters may not have worked properly in particular. I might've spent a little more time on it, but I'm on my way out the door.

IE don't make any business decisions based on this list :)

EDIT: err, wound up back in the door. And noticed I totally screwed up the one I pasted in (forgot the "sort" on the last run I did, duh.) It's better now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Apparently some Chinese company tried to get the chinese for ".gov" or ".government", and the Republic of China[1] and Hong Kong[2] governments are unhappy, to say the least!

[1] [https://gacweb.icann.org/download/attachments/22938690/GOVID...](https://gacweb.icann.org/download/attachments/22938690/GOVIDN- TW-56316.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1353452204000)

[2] [https://gacweb.icann.org/download/attachments/22938690/GOVID...](https://gacweb.icann.org/download/attachments/22938690/GOVIDN- HK-94344.pdf?version=1&modificationDate=1353451730000)

</comment><comment><USER12> I thought it was interesting that Saudi Arabia was opposed to granting certain gTLDs on the grounds that they would likely be used to host content which their culture considers offensive. To me, it seems like if that government could censor all* homosexuality and "substances detrimental to public order and morals" by blocking _.gay and_.wine, then that would be in its interest.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting to see Donuts co didn't get mentioned once despite applying for 320 gTLDs.

<comment><USER14> That is because Donuts applied for its gTLDs through a number of LLCs with names like "Delta Mill, LLC" and "Snow Sky, LLC". You can find a great many of them objected to.

<comment><USER13> Ah that makes more sense.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I actually think some TLDs like .book, .app, .movie, could be useful. Often for movies you see they've used domains like reavingzombiesmovie.com, which would be better as reavingzombies.movie, and would let someone else buy reavingzombies.app or .book, for an entirely different product that happens to share a name

All of these TLDs should only be sold to companies who plan to let people buy domains from them

The idea of Amazon owning .book or Apple owning .app just seems bad for the internet as a whole

</comment><comment><USER16> I can't decide if I think the TLDs should be first-come, first-served like regular domain names are (unless someone cares to correct me? I don't know specifics), or if I'd love there to be precedence blocking people from registering generic words. If you can register banana.com, why not .banana? But then .banana would certainly be squatted for someone holding out for millions against Chiquita, and that's just crappy for everyone.

</comment><comment><USER17> This whole gLTD thing is stupid and will cause horrible confusion and scamming.

There should be .global or .world and each country should pick a translation or two of "global", and they should all be aliases for each other. Basically just make non-US-specific version .com for all uses.

<comment><USER11> What about just ".g"? It's a single latin letter, easy to say, and short enough that non-English speakers will be able to deal with it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Ten Minute Painting - <AUTHOR> https://tenminutepainting.com <comment><USER2> That was...an interesting 10 minutes.</comment>


Ask HN: Arxiv.org Comment - <AUTHOR>

Arxiv.org need own comment system - better do it on HN clone platform http://news.locr.co <comment><USER2> (<http://news.locr.co>)

(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3183553>)

(<http://arxiv.org/>)

</comment><comment><USER3> You improve the comment system at the cost of all the other features.</comment>