With a game as ubiquitous as WoW, how do you ban a dynamic IP (what most home IP addresses still are) without banning a large number of innocent subscribers? You really can't. You can ban accounts though, and require that any interaction with the game or the forums require a valid account, and that is far easier to enforce and eliminates most of the collateral damage. At the moment i believe they do suspend accounts, but it doesn't seem to be working at all.
It has also backfired big time. Not only are are hacked player accounts a source of gold, but the farmers need them to advertise their services (i.e. spam like crazy), which means that half the links on anything wow-related, including the official forums, lead to something nasty..
I'm fairly certain that temporarily suspending IP's would be work better. If you, or whoever had that ip before you, are trojaned and miss out on an evening of wow; that's tough luck of course, but there are only so many open proxies -- and botnet access costs real money.
As for WOW itself, location hacks exist as the client and server are not always in synch for these actions. The biggest impact "cheaters" have on WOW is on the non-cheating players. Money transfers between accounts take an hour to complete, sales via the auction house are no longer immediate but instead take an hour, and trial accounts are so restricted that teaching someone to play with one is an exercise in frustration. You forget about the incessant spam and hacking attempts. Blizzard has 9 million players to help them report spammers, and still can't get those IP addresses banned from the game and official forums..
MySQL is the poster child for open-source RDBMS (sorry Firebird, sorry Postgres) Yup, MySQL is the IE of databases; good enough for the ignorant masses, and about as standards-compliant. Should you ever want to port your app, or just learn to use a different RDBMS, you'll have a lot of extra grief to overcome.
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You certainly _don't_ want to modify a named party's statement in any way before publishing it; that's a whole lot worse than copyright violation.
It has also backfired big time. Not only are are hacked player accounts a source of gold, but the farmers need them to advertise their services (i.e. spam like crazy), which means that half the links on anything wow-related, including the official forums, lead to something nasty..
I'm fairly certain that temporarily suspending IP's would be work better. If you, or whoever had that ip before you, are trojaned and miss out on an evening of wow; that's tough luck of course, but there are only so many open proxies -- and botnet access costs real money.
Postgres is BSD licenced. - http://www.postgresql.org/about/licence
If you don't have a problem tivoization, why would you use GPL in the first place?
Pick BSD/MIT then..
Should you ever want to port your app, or just learn to use a different RDBMS, you'll have a lot of extra grief to overcome.
Postgres has two 'blob' types.
The standard type for binary data is BYTEA, but you also have BLOB which if i understand correctly is somewhat legacy.
BLOBS can be streamed to/from, while BYTEA fields are processed 'whole'.
I'm sure you could cope without, but it seems like this is actually included in some shape or form.. The release notes mention:
Aggregate-function improvements, including multiple-input aggregates and SQL:2003 statistical functions