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.

Goon Haven has a couple admins. We're trying to get the rest of our admin-base to play some, but they're not interested in playing Ace of Spades.

I'd admin if I could host a server that actually worked. I can host, but nobody can join mine for some weird reason.

@Kaede: I blame gremlins. They're also responsible for me continuing to be a bunch of pink diamonds here in the forums.

The problem is that right now the only admin on vanilla servers is the host, as far as I know.

1337101, try registering a completely new:
Email address. ((((((PREFERABLY GMAIL))))))
Forum account
Gravatar account with the email you just created and registered with.

I'll try a few other things first, but I'll keep that in mind as the last solution.

Umm... this will sound stupid, but how can I delete my old AoS Forums account? I can't find the option anywhere. I really want to continue to use this same name, but since Wordpress won't allow me to change my username I need to delete this account to do this.

i support, and you cant delete your account :(
@Kaede-chan, have you port forwarded correctly, cause from the basic description your giving, it sounds just like a basic port-forwarding error, if its not that, you could always post in the support forums and give better details so the techno-wizzes on our lovely forum can help you :3

You can't as far as I know. But it's not like it really matters. We don't have personal stats here as of yet.

No way to know how many posts you've posted, how many threads you've created.... just a history.

@alex: I've already port forwarded correctly. I was able to get my server connected to the master server just fine, except nobody but me could enter it. It's dumb.