I didn't realize you would fight for my sizeable support share. :3

Anyway, I spoke with a few people about draft balancing, and nobody dislikes the idea, though of course it wouldn't be used the majority of the time. There really could be nothing better for a bunch of unclanned friends fighting each other (See: 1944 games) or a single clan having a training brawl (See: 1944 games).

This is exactly right. It would be nice if we had some magic way of determining who the best was algorithmically but there is simply no better metric than "my team won". I regularly leave metal spots to my teammates, bleed large amounts of resources, play in coop, and so on. Sometimes these are wise strategies that help us win, sometimes they are not.

note that

http://planetspring.free.fr/

is down and became

http://buildbot.eat-peet.net/spring/

Link in the first post is dead for me ..

anyone still having a tar around for the current spring version? i would like to give this bot a try :D

404 Not Found.

Installer downloads from planetspring and it's dead now. So installer is useless i think.
Wait for bibim to sort out hosting problems.

SPADS repository should be back online at "planetspads.free.fr" instead of "planetspring.free.fr". I have updated the installer link in the first post.

Currently, all SPADS autohosts no longer auto-update because they don't know where to get the files. So you have to download and run manually the new updater like this:

Linux/UNIX:
Windows:
Where <release> is your actual SPADS release (stable, testing, or unstable)

You can then restart your autohosts manually, or wait for them to detect that their files changed and auto-restart by themselves.

1) ActivePerl installed
2) wget installed

tried to run "perl spadsInstaller.pl", says error:
"ERROR - [SpadsInstaller] Couldn't find wget, please install wget before installing SPADS"

So... how do i ensure my wget bin directory is in my PATH environment variable? and what is PATH environment variable? how do i change it?

OS: Windows XP

great, ive never used that one. also it would be nice to have "install.bat" in the spads folder, which has that "perl spadsInstaller.pl" command, and "pause" after it, less manual working is always better. actually that bat file should handle this PATH variable thing too, kinda dangerous to let users edit it manually like that...

could you update your first post and add information about this "PATH" variable? so we all know what is it for sure.

Is it normal that my ping on my own server is 100? or even higher... o.o

Edit: oh and the default installation didnt have mingwm10.dll file in it, had to download it myself from dll-files.com

Edit: Any possibilities to disable votekick/ban for specific nicks, for example the bot owner (me) ?

Edit: can this save the replays of every game?

Yes, ask engine devs for more info.

You could also have taken the one from your Spring install directory. Actually SPADS should use this one automatically but it seems on some Windows configurations it doesn't, and that's why you got the error. Anyway this will be fixed in next update.

!kick shouldnt be disabled for some users, because then if you go afk the autohost is stuck... And !kickban is already disabled on privileged users.

It already does.

but they can !votespec ? cant they?
i just dont want some smurfs spamming !kick TradeMark all the time

more questions:

1) is it possible to lock the settings i want? like the map, map boxes, metal, etc...
2) can i use my tasclient player groups to replace some players ranks? so many smurfs playing that the game gets imba with autobalance without replaced ranks :D

How do i add presets?

like !createpreset noair armap corap armaap coraap

or some command like that, i want to disable units

They can, but usually they don't know about it, and they would rather change autohost than learning a new command
Well, if they keep trying to kick you knowing that you're the bot owner, there is something wrong... I guess you can temp ban them...
Sure. You just need to adjust the setting files to your needs. Usually the syntax is "[<presetName>]" and "<settingName>:<defaultValue>|<otherAllowedValue>|<otherAllowedValue>...". If you need information concerning specific settings or commands, I strongly suggest using SPADS documentation
You can indeed bypass lobby ranks and use IP ranks, or affect rank manually to lobby accounts. Take a look at the chrank command documentation for instance.
By adding sections in spads.conf for global presets, hostingPresets.conf for hosting presets, and battlePresets.conf for battle presets.
This is done with the disabledunits battle setting.

i dont understand, can you give example how to disable units without restarting my autohost?

like !disableunits armap corap armaap coraap

or something like that

If you didnt change the default configuration, it doesn't allow you to change the disabledunits battle setting.
So you will have to edit your battlePresets.conf to add the allowed values, then reload the configuration with the !reloadConf command.

[23:32:01] <TradeMark> !reloadConf
[23:32:01] <TradeHost> Unable to reload SPADS configuration

what did i do wrong?

Remember to check SPADS standard output in the command line interface and/or SPADS logs in your var directory (spads.log). You should have all the information here.

As you can see in the disabledunits documentation, the disabled units should be separated by ";".

Btw, when I'm online in the lobby you can contact me directly there. It would be much more efficient than through the forum.