[Norfleet]

Here's a big suggestion that could potentially take some work to implement, but be very awesome:

1. Don't use the Dominions II pretender upload interface: It's too prone to undesirable behaviors like accidental starting or overwriting. Instead, make people upload and delete their pretenders for the game through their web interface: That way, nobody can overwrite somebody else's slot, start the game prematurely, etc.

2. Implement AWOL tracking: A player has obviously staled when, at the time of a turn generation, his .trn file exists and is more recent than his .2h: If this occurs for several turns in a row, perhaps a number of turns determined at game setup, the player can be deemed to be AWOL. Since he had to submit his pretender through the web interface, the server now knows who he is: Display his AWOLness on the game status screen, and mark it on his permanent record.

3. Allow a player to hand his slot over to another player. Allow a player deemed to be AWOL to have his slot taken over by another player, if he did not password and can be subbed.

4. Configure the game setup such that the creator of a game can disallow a player who has more than X games AWOL to join: Thus, if BillyBob has gone AWOL in 3 games, and I wish to start a zero-tolerance game, such that no player who has ever gone AWOL may join, this player may not join the game. The caveat being that an unruly game-wrecker may attempt to create a second account to get around this. Also allow it such that games can be restricted to allow only those whose accounts were created BEFORE the game was created, or some other fixed date/offset. As a stopgap measure to reduce this occurrence, disallow anyone whose IP/email matches that of a player who has been recorded as going AWOL from creating another account. This won't catch them all, but it'll certainly make this harder, and be fairly trivial to implement.