After hearing suggestions for many new ways to prevent trolls, griefing, etc, some good, some bad, I gave up and am now shouting from the rooftops the real way to stop the skiddies from ruining your server.

They're called admins. They're actual people who actually supervise things. They can make calls better than any software, assess a situation more accurately, and they're harder to abuse than a public votekick.

However, most server hosts don't monitor their servers very well. This is a problem. Some hosts check on their servers frequently or maintain their presence (or save and close servers when they're away) to keep things under control, and their servers are consistently the best I've been on. It's crucial to hosting a good server that you keep an eye on things to destroy the trolls and protect the people that just want to play a fun game without constantly having to votekick Deuces.

The only feature for vanilla AoS server software that REALLY needs to be implemented is a way for server hosts to appoint admins, and possibly moderators, with the power to kick and ban at will (or just kick and tempban, in the case of moderators). The exact features would need some consideration (can all admins make admins, or only the host? What about making moderators? Could other mods do it or not?), but the overall idea would go a long way to making a better game experience.

All a host would need to do is gather up a friend or two, give them the appropriate powers, and start a server up. This would also strengthen the community (players that have gained a positive reputation might end up moderators on a plethora of servers, meaning that they can play in a bunch of different places and still remain helpful to the other players. If every single member of the AoS community who was trustworthy enough for the job was given it, griefers wouldn't stand a chance. They'd be kicked by five people at once) a bit overall. Servers could potentially have a moderator or admin online at all times, making things very hard indeed for griefers.

So hosts, PLEASE supervise your servers better, and Ben, can we get a feature like this? The system doesn't even require registration to work... server hosts could set a password a la PySpades.