did that connection come from us
If something connected to your server, asked for its status and disconnected without anyone joining, it may have been one of our scans. It may equally have been someone else: an address that answers is scanned by a lot of people. Here is what ours look like.
[what did you actually send]
A connection to a port, then the same status request the in-game server list sends when you add a server to it, then we read the reply and disconnect. A few hundred bytes, and nobody appears in your world.
We were not looking for your server in particular. We do not choose where to look by who runs a server, what is built on it, who plays there or anything else about it, and there is no list of anyone we are trying to find. A server that answers is asked again from time to time so its entry stays current. One that does not answer is asked far less often.
[what do you do inside a server]
Sometimes more than scan. When a server turns out to let in anyone who knows the address, we try to tell whoever runs it. A bot joins, says the server is open, and leaves; a member may leave a sign carrying the same warning where people are actually active; and if a server looks like it matters, we try to reach whoever runs it directly, because a line in chat only reaches whoever happened to be online.
The whole of that is looking and telling. What we do and do not do is set out on the page we point those servers at.
[what do you never do]
We never guess a password or use an exploit, and a whitelist, a login plugin or a firewall is an answer we take.
We never publish the address of any individual server. The census is counts and shares, and any group smaller than five servers is withheld from it.
[where does the traffic come from]
Lucky has no server farm. Members run the scanner on their own computers, so probes arrive from ordinary home and hosting addresses, and the set of them changes as people come and go.
Most scanning projects publish a list of their addresses so you can block them. We cannot. The list would be wrong within a day, and a wrong list is worse than no list, because you would trust it.
What we can tell you instead:
- Every member installed the scanner themselves and knows what it does. Nothing installs itself, and nothing is bundled with anything else.
- No third party's traffic passes through a member's machine.
- Nobody is paid, and nothing about this is monetised.
- Opting out stops the scanning of your address whichever machine it would have come from, which is the thing a source list would have let you do yourself.
[how do I make it stop]
Ask us, at lucky.systems/opt-out. You prove the server is yours by putting a short code in its MOTD, which needs no account and no paperwork. It covers the scan and the join alike.
For a whole range, or if you are a host acting for your customers, write to [email protected] and we will exclude it.
Please write to us rather than to a member's internet provider. Publishing this page is how we take responsibility for the traffic; the person whose machine it left is not the right recipient of a complaint about it.