Abuse of the drawing system

So I run an evil Pathfinder campaign on here. One player, I cannot tell who, is writing offensive messages on the chat. There's no apparent way to tell which player is doing this. If it doesn't stop, is there anything I can do about this? Can I lock a map from player drawings, or track who wrote what? I'm a seasoned web developer (work with Java, PHP, C#, JSON and core node.js) ... So I could help add such functionality if it's needed. How would other DMs handle this?

There is no means to lock players out of drawing. It's worth mentioning that the default color for any drawing is the player's color -- the box next to their name at the bottom of the screen; while a player can change that color, it might help in identifying the offending player. As far as steps to prevent it, I've found that creating a "landing page" or "OOC room" is useful, for several reasons. First and foremost, if you move the playerpage ribbon to the landing page after each session, nobody will see whatever you're working on if they show up early. It also gives you a good means to collect all the cats together when you're ready to start. I've encouraged my own players to draw in the OOC room as much as they please ( and boy have they ). They can let out all of their desire to doodle and then not doodle elsewhere when it's not desired. Finally, if you do identify who's drawing on your maps, you can use the Split the Party feature to send just that player back to the OOC room as a "time out" without resorting to kicking them from the campaign, if you don't want to. They won't be able to continue drawing in your campaign pages while in time out, and you have access to a punishment that isn't quite so severe. As a drastic measure, if you still can't identify who the problem child is, you could move the playerpage ribbon to the OOC room to get everyone in time out. Much like how my parents trained me to wear my seatbelt by pulling the car over until I buckled up again whenever I'd unbuckle myself. It's not the greatest solution, in that it's punishing the group for the actions of the few, but when you don't know who the "few" are, there aren't many other choices.

Would it not be possible to add some tracking of whom adds what texts? Maybe add a created by or modified by tooltip? Maybe restrict the players to only post in their color? It doesn't seem like this would be too difficult to add ^-^

I suppose it would be possible to create an API script to track the doodling. on('add:path', function(obj) { var player = getObj('player', obj.get('controlledby')); if (player) { log(player.get('displayname') + ' drew on the map'); } }); Asking to have something like that included in the base VTT seems like something for the Suggestions forum rather than the Bugs forum, though. =)

Is there a way for DMs to add scripts? In any case thanks for the consultation ^^

Will, you have to be a Mentor. Which is totally worth it by the way.

Ok, you could try and trick them: Say you have 4 players, then create the same map 4 times. Exactly the same. When the offending player starts again, use the split the party feature to move every player to their own map. Of course watching all four is gonna be a nightmare (you can keep more than one browser window open though, and each one looking at a different map). If you're in a situation where there's not much movement involved, it probably won't be noticable for a while at least that everyone is on their own map. Now watch which map the doodling appears on, and you got your culprit. If they figure out something's amiss, say something "Hm, there seems to be an issue with Roll 20 not updating for everybody. Ok, everyone hit the reload button and we see if that fixes it", and while they reload you move them all to the same map again.

Or you can just tell everyone in the group that if it does not stop the session is over then keep your word. Quite literally just stop the game and move everyone to a blank page and let them sit then talk to them and explain your displeasure in the immaturity of the one player who is doing this. Seriously think about starting a whole new campaign with new players unless you can find out who is doing it. One person can ruin everyone's fun.

Argh. This all seems convoluted. Derailing the campaign is probably what this sociopathic little griefer wants in any case. Any chance of roll20 devs just adding some node.JS that tracks that? Suppose that sort of logging would get expensive fast at a DB level..

The real issue is that there's no way to identify these people or lock the maps... So it sort of brings the game to a grinding hault.

I've seen games destroyed by the inability to deal with one player that thinks it is fun to ruin other peoples game.

Ultimately it's not the game developer's problem, or their fault. As a web developer I can say... Cons: -Logging of this would definitely slow the site down -DB maintenance issues Pros: -Easy to implement with some bool "isMapLocked" or "isPlayerDrawingLocked" in JS or Flash -Add check on drawing submit event to respect the bool -Prevents abuse outright Call me a skeptic, but I think it'd be best to just prevent player drawing on maps by default, or just let the individual DM decide.

FWIW, the "logging" is already there, sort of; there simply isn't any way to access it short of the API, which is a Mentor-only feature. All drawings have a "controlledby" property. While the documentation says it's a comma-delimited list of ids of who controls the path, there's no means through the user interface to add more players to that list, and the list is pre-populated with the path's creator. Thus, unless the property is modified by an API script, that property contains the id of the player who created that path. It's not a solution for a non-Mentor GM, but any expansions to the VTT wouldn't have the issue of additional load on the DB storage.