Which identifier to ban on
All of them. A ban held against one identifier is a ban held until the player makes a new account of that kind — a new Steam account is free and takes two minutes — so admin tools worth using check every identifier on every connection, and one match is enough to refuse them.
If you can only keep one, keep the licence: every player has one, and replacing it means buying the game again. Keep the IP address as a link between accounts rather than a ban in itself, because a whole student hall can share one, and add the hardware tokens wherever your tools record them.
Steam hex, SteamID64, SteamID and SteamID3
They are four ways of writing one 64-bit number. FiveM writes it in hexadecimal after steam:, Steam puts it in decimal in a profile link (the SteamID64), and older games and admin tools write the account number inside it as STEAM_0:Y:Z, where Y is the account number’s last bit and Z is the rest of it halved. SteamID3 is the account number written as [U:1:N].
The arithmetic is short: a SteamID64 is 76561197960265728 plus the account number. So steam:110000112345678 is the SteamID64 76561198265685624, account number 305419896, STEAM_0:0:152709948 and [U:1:305419896]. The converter does this with exact whole-number maths, because the usual JavaScript number rounds a SteamID64 and quietly gives you somebody else’s profile.
A custom profile address, steamcommunity.com/id/ and a name, cannot be converted without asking Steam, and this tool asks nobody. Open the profile, or ask the player for the steamcommunity.com/profiles/ link instead.
How a Discord ID tells you its age
A Discord ID is a snowflake: the top 42 bits are the number of milliseconds since the first moment of 2015, when Discord’s clock starts. Shift the ID right by 22 bits, add 1 January 2015, and you have the moment the account was made, to the millisecond.
It is the most useful thing in a ban evader’s identifiers. A player claiming to be new with a Discord account made last Tuesday, joining a week after somebody with the same habits was banned, is a conversation worth having.
Identifiers are your players’ personal data
An IP address, and anything that singles out one person, is personal data. Keep identifiers in staff-only channels rather than pasting them into a public ban log, and only look at a player’s identifiers when you have a reason to.
This converter runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste is sent to FiveStaff or anybody else, nothing is stored, and closing the tab is the end of it.
