This post is here to introduce a few changes and explain some of the ideas behind how the TS server is set up, what your permissions allow you to do, and what we'd recommend doing in different situations.

In addition to the admin group, there are 3 different types of server groups:

• Guests
• Members
• Squadrons

Guests include members of the "VIP" group and your regular, straight off the mean internet streets guests. The VIP group gives guests who are regular visitors and good friends of ours the ability to move in to most channels which are not automatically accessible to the public. VIP will also give you the ability to move other clients to different channels.

The groups based around the ranks from 2nd Lt. to Col. are server groups assigned to members of F99th. Once you become a member of F99th, you are added to the 2nd Lt. group. This will give you all the permissions of the VIP group and also grants you the ability to kick guests (not VIP guests) from the server. 1st Lt. and above will also give you the ability to ban a guest for up to 30 minutes.

Squadron groups correspond to the different squadrons members may be a part of within F99th. Each squadron has their own channel and are granted a channel admin privilege for it. This allows you to create, delete, or modify sub-channels inside of it and also to kick anyone from the channel (not to be confused with kicking from the server) who is not a channel or server admin. It also gives you a pretty nifty 16 by 16 pixel icon to show off your squadron pride, provided your squadron or someone else has made one for us to use.

Channels are arranged in order of increasing permission requirements to join.

At the top, you'll find the lobby, and for the next few lines you'll find channels such as the server red & blue channels, mission builders, help, etc. These channels are open to the public. Below this starts the "Members Only" section which will also be open to our good friends in the VIP group. Again, members of a squadron will have channel admin privileges in their squadron channel so they have some freedom to set things up in there as they see fit. Below the squadron channels you'll find the "Other Games" section where we have a bunch of rooms set up for a lot of the DCS alternatives we play regularly. Below that is the AFK channel which will help save bandwidth if someone isn't actually there to make use of the data involved in sending/receiving communications. Finally, I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of an "Inconspicuous Secret Admin Channel" that you may or may not have happened to see or not see. God only knows what may or may not happen there.

Note that the "Other Games" channels are not accessible to the public.

The idea behind this is that we officially support a public DCS dedicated server which (ideally) is up 24/7, so we also provide a public means of communication to complement it. While many of us play ArmA or Wargame or Elite: Dangerous with some regularity and in some cases we do have associated servers, dedicated or not, we remain a DCS focused group. The 50 available slots we have as part of our TS plan usually is pretty ample for our needs, but on a busy day we could get close to running out of space. Because we do have limited space, we don't want our server to become the de-facto public TS for a bunch of other games that we aren't officially supporting. That being said, members and guests alike are more than welcome to make use of those channels any time they would like to. The only condition for this is that a member of F99th or a VIP guest must be involved. Any F99th member or VIP guest can get in the channel and then move their friends in with them. This can be done either by dragging and dropping the name of the client in the list to the channel or by right clicking on the client's name and selecting the "Move Client to Own Channel" option.

In the event that you (an F99th member or VIP guest) feel the need to kick or ban someone, you may make free use of the aforementioned kick/ban permissions as you see fit. However, we expect that these permissions will not be abused. We are a pretty tolerant bunch. For example, many of you may remember a certain energy drink and skateboarding company enthusiast that had a real knack for quickly and violently raising our respective blood pressures. That individual got to a total of around 260 visits before receiving a temporary ban, though there were a number of kicks along the way. We're not necessarily looking for you to torture yourself with restraint, but we would like to keep some semblance of that precedent.

These new 30 minute ban privileges were instituted to give members more ability to preserve the integrity of our TS in the absence of a server admin. After several instances of having one troll or another enter the server and do something as groundbreaking as blasting your ears out with static, we're ready to make TS administering GREAT AGAIN. Hopefully a 30 minute ban will be sufficient to keep them out of your way, but in order to arrange a longer or permanent ban you will need to get a server admin (currently TracerFacer, Mataman, runny, G-Man, or myself) involved.

In order to help us track down exactly who needs a dose of TS justice, there are a couple different options you can pursue. You can right click the offender's name and select "Make a Complaint" which is about the easiest way for us to find them, but the downside of this is that it can only be done while the client is still connected to the server. When someone is blasting your ears and speakers to bits, you should kick/ban them first and save yourself the misery. In this case, you can give us a name (copy+paste is best) and timestamp or screenshot of the log containing the same and we can look back in the history to find them. Post said name/timestamp or screenshot on the forums and we'll get to it ASAP.

If you have further questions, post them below and this post will be updated as appropriate.