I was randomly banned for cheating while playing a trickshot server?
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that is actually insane, obvious the anti-cheat is bugged yet the staff dont even acknowledge it, and the contributors are clearly no help either, someone needs to bring awareness to this clear problem
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that is actually insane, obvious the anti-cheat is bugged yet the staff dont even acknowledge it, and the contributors are clearly no help either, someone needs to bring awareness to this clear problem
embracenewlife what kind of help would you want from the contributors? we are just normal users like you, we have no special mystical powers, no ability to check logs, etc... we just happened to donate to help the project we like which usually means you'll see us around more often and can TRY to provide information from what we have witnessed and learned from previous incidents... that is exactly what we did.
We can only point you in the direction of the anti-cheat documentation, and give advice based on previous people who have complained about the anti-cheat... which is usually all that is needed for folks to realize the mistake they have made.
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embracenewlife what kind of help would you want from the contributors? we are just normal users like you, we have no special mystical powers, no ability to check logs, etc... we just happened to donate to help the project we like which usually means you'll see us around more often and can TRY to provide information from what we have witnessed and learned from previous incidents... that is exactly what we did.
We can only point you in the direction of the anti-cheat documentation, and give advice based on previous people who have complained about the anti-cheat... which is usually all that is needed for folks to realize the mistake they have made.
DirkRockface Can you please contact someone that can help me and show them the youtube video that I linked? I would be willing to hop in a call and do an entire PC check to see what is triggering the anti cheat. I really enjoy playing the game and don't want to just be banned off of it when I haven't done anything intentionally. HELP PLS SIR
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embracenewlife what kind of help would you want from the contributors? we are just normal users like you, we have no special mystical powers, no ability to check logs, etc... we just happened to donate to help the project we like which usually means you'll see us around more often and can TRY to provide information from what we have witnessed and learned from previous incidents... that is exactly what we did.
We can only point you in the direction of the anti-cheat documentation, and give advice based on previous people who have complained about the anti-cheat... which is usually all that is needed for folks to realize the mistake they have made.
DirkRockface you can specifically help by pc checking people who claim to be falsely banned instead of just being like "hey, im sorry cant do anything about it" or "youve been banned for a reason" when false flags happens in other games all the time, plutonium is no exception to this
also id like to argue that even though contributors have to follow the same rules as normal people, that doesnt make you like us, this is because contributors have more contributions than other people, even having access to early builds of plutonium that we dont have, youre normal in the sense of having to follow the rules and not having the powers the actual staff has, but youre not normal in the sense of that you have early access builds
finally, i want to point out that while you do point out the anti-cheat document, it actually has flaws in the document, here are a few examples that i see:
"Plutonium has an anti-cheat that was completely custom made by our developers. While we cannot divulge
information on how it works, we can confidently say that it works as we have thwarted over 20,000 cheating attempts! It will never catch everything but it most people agree that is does a better job than some others out there."not only do we not know what percentage of the 20,000 cheating attempts are actual cheating attempts vs false flags, the source is outdated by 4 years with the latest update to the anti-cheat detection graph being on july 31, 2021
"We will not provide any information regarding any given ban, remember you broke our rules."
this is a bad argument, as again, false flags has happened in other games and so did this, even disregarding other games, gore's proof shows him just regularly playing on leetin servers before he was perma banned
also in that doc, it gives out a list of things that can get you banned which is nice, but it only gives a "following but not limited to" list instead of a full list in which when several people are claiming to be falsely banned, dont you think whoever made the anti-cheat forum can make it a full list so people know what to avoid when playing on the client?
obviously, there is no shade and i understand that youre not staff so your power is limited, but there are ways you can help contribute to helping with the anti-cheat problem beyond what the staff can control, i hope you can take my argument into consideration, if you have any questions feel free to ask me
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DirkRockface Can you please contact someone that can help me and show them the youtube video that I linked? I would be willing to hop in a call and do an entire PC check to see what is triggering the anti cheat. I really enjoy playing the game and don't want to just be banned off of it when I haven't done anything intentionally. HELP PLS SIR
gore_ can i ask, what applications you were running when you got your first ban?
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DirkRockface you can specifically help by pc checking people who claim to be falsely banned instead of just being like "hey, im sorry cant do anything about it" or "youve been banned for a reason" when false flags happens in other games all the time, plutonium is no exception to this
also id like to argue that even though contributors have to follow the same rules as normal people, that doesnt make you like us, this is because contributors have more contributions than other people, even having access to early builds of plutonium that we dont have, youre normal in the sense of having to follow the rules and not having the powers the actual staff has, but youre not normal in the sense of that you have early access builds
finally, i want to point out that while you do point out the anti-cheat document, it actually has flaws in the document, here are a few examples that i see:
"Plutonium has an anti-cheat that was completely custom made by our developers. While we cannot divulge
information on how it works, we can confidently say that it works as we have thwarted over 20,000 cheating attempts! It will never catch everything but it most people agree that is does a better job than some others out there."not only do we not know what percentage of the 20,000 cheating attempts are actual cheating attempts vs false flags, the source is outdated by 4 years with the latest update to the anti-cheat detection graph being on july 31, 2021
"We will not provide any information regarding any given ban, remember you broke our rules."
this is a bad argument, as again, false flags has happened in other games and so did this, even disregarding other games, gore's proof shows him just regularly playing on leetin servers before he was perma banned
also in that doc, it gives out a list of things that can get you banned which is nice, but it only gives a "following but not limited to" list instead of a full list in which when several people are claiming to be falsely banned, dont you think whoever made the anti-cheat forum can make it a full list so people know what to avoid when playing on the client?
obviously, there is no shade and i understand that youre not staff so your power is limited, but there are ways you can help contribute to helping with the anti-cheat problem beyond what the staff can control, i hope you can take my argument into consideration, if you have any questions feel free to ask me
embracenewlife I would love to help if i could, but my point is that even if i did "pc check people who claim to be falsely banned" what would i do with that information?
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there is NO way that i would be able to 100% be able to say, "Yep, you didn't cheat". even the video that was uploaded, there is no way for anyone to see what is going on in the back ground/what was loaded or injected before the record button was pressed.
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BUT lets assume that i was in the room with you and was 100% certain that you hadn't cheated... how does that help? based on MY opinion, the staff isn't going to believe what i say any more than they believe you so i'm not sure how that would help.
"instead of just being like "hey, im sorry cant do anything about it"
There literally is NOTHING that a contributor can do about it... having access to early builds doesn't give us a key to the admin chat room where we can vouch for you or try to give our opinion on if we thought you actually cheated or not. Wish i could help more my friend, but at the end of the day, i'm just a regular user with some extra pieces of flare and purple name tag
Sorry man.
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embracenewlife I would love to help if i could, but my point is that even if i did "pc check people who claim to be falsely banned" what would i do with that information?
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there is NO way that i would be able to 100% be able to say, "Yep, you didn't cheat". even the video that was uploaded, there is no way for anyone to see what is going on in the back ground/what was loaded or injected before the record button was pressed.
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BUT lets assume that i was in the room with you and was 100% certain that you hadn't cheated... how does that help? based on MY opinion, the staff isn't going to believe what i say any more than they believe you so i'm not sure how that would help.
"instead of just being like "hey, im sorry cant do anything about it"
There literally is NOTHING that a contributor can do about it... having access to early builds doesn't give us a key to the admin chat room where we can vouch for you or try to give our opinion on if we thought you actually cheated or not. Wish i could help more my friend, but at the end of the day, i'm just a regular user with some extra pieces of flare and purple name tag
Sorry man.
DirkRockface look, I understand that you think you cant help, but there is a way to check what was loaded/injected in the past with pc checks, also i have seen another contributor @ two staff members asking to lock the chat in the other thread gore has linked, and one of them (while not right away) eventually responded by locking the chat.
And sure, maybe they might not believe the voices that are being heard or the video that he posted, but if the pc check is done and it turns out that his pc is CLEAN, then we can @ one of the staff as well, and yes i know, they dont respond immediately, but i do want to bring it up since your "i dont access to the admin chat room" argument isnt really all that as contributors in the past had @'d people in threads like this and had some sort of response whether that'd be immediate or eventually.
And again, I understand there is not much you can do, but there is something that we can do if enough people are heard about this anti-cheat problem, what do you think is happening with Activision/Treyarch with Black Ops 7 and what they're doing after everyone is moving over to Battlefield 6 and listening to the community? This is something that people need to be vocal about, this is not only to unban one person, but to unban people that were falsely banned AND to help improve the anti-cheat because i love plutonium, i want it to be revived and what the community (and staff) does for plutonium with new things is great, but we also need to improve certain things that are outdated or faulty to make things like this less, you know what I mean?
I believe that eventually there will be a ban appeal system where falsely banned people can have a voice that is listened to and be finally unbanned, because i understand that you want to help, and you can, its just that because of how unimpactful you think you are (when you do make a big impact), you dont, but i know you can the other contributors can do better than this.
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gore_ can i ask, what applications you were running when you got your first ban?
embracenewlife discord, steam, default nvidia programs. i was making sure to close legit everything i wasn't using since I was banned previously. i would intentionally make it so i had as least possible open while playing as well. I really appreciate your contribution to trying to resolve this issue. I know for a fact that I am not the only person getting falsely banned. I looked in the discord server at the ban logs and there are multiple people being banned each day and pluto is not the popular of a game nor would the majority of players want to cheat on it. It doesn't make sense and I am sure that it is happening to other people. Most others probably just don't care enough to even speak up. I love pluto lol I have probably 2k hours or even more played on bo2 trickshotting all together. This shit blows.
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embracenewlife discord, steam, default nvidia programs. i was making sure to close legit everything i wasn't using since I was banned previously. i would intentionally make it so i had as least possible open while playing as well. I really appreciate your contribution to trying to resolve this issue. I know for a fact that I am not the only person getting falsely banned. I looked in the discord server at the ban logs and there are multiple people being banned each day and pluto is not the popular of a game nor would the majority of players want to cheat on it. It doesn't make sense and I am sure that it is happening to other people. Most others probably just don't care enough to even speak up. I love pluto lol I have probably 2k hours or even more played on bo2 trickshotting all together. This shit blows.
gore_ me and you think alike, ill find out how to pc check and ill pc check you just to confirm it, can i have your discord?
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i highly doubt recording on obs has anything to do with his problem, as i do record with the anti-cheat compatibility hook on and i have yet to be banned, of course it is different for each person, but as for me, it isnt something worth noting
also there is something completely insane that the document is saying that rubs me the wrong way, it says here:
"If either of those methods do not work, you can choose Display Capture for a source, but keep in mind it will record everything on the display and not just Plutonium."
this implies that regardless of whether you have the anti-cheat compatibility hook unchecked or not, it can still not function as intended and as a result, get you banned or not record the screen, I do like the display screen recording idea as it does show everything, but it will 100% guarantee you a safe way to not get banned
also, he didnt once mention obs, he mentioned having default nvidia programs which includes shadowplay v.i.a nvidia app, but it shows the whole display again instead of the application, thats partly why i think he was unfairly banned
i get what youre saying though, but we would need the actual staff to confirm if obs is detected through the anti-cheat in any way
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i highly doubt recording on obs has anything to do with his problem, as i do record with the anti-cheat compatibility hook on and i have yet to be banned, of course it is different for each person, but as for me, it isnt something worth noting
also there is something completely insane that the document is saying that rubs me the wrong way, it says here:
"If either of those methods do not work, you can choose Display Capture for a source, but keep in mind it will record everything on the display and not just Plutonium."
this implies that regardless of whether you have the anti-cheat compatibility hook unchecked or not, it can still not function as intended and as a result, get you banned or not record the screen, I do like the display screen recording idea as it does show everything, but it will 100% guarantee you a safe way to not get banned
also, he didnt once mention obs, he mentioned having default nvidia programs which includes shadowplay v.i.a nvidia app, but it shows the whole display again instead of the application, thats partly why i think he was unfairly banned
i get what youre saying though, but we would need the actual staff to confirm if obs is detected through the anti-cheat in any way
embracenewlife yeah i dont use obs to record i use nvidia shadow play as do every other trickshotter on the game. discord g0r3_3
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ok im adding you right now, just add me back and we ill pc check you
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ok im adding you right now, just add me back and we ill pc check you
embracenewlife If you peoples happen to find any potential answers from this, please bring it up here, I would really appreciate that
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oh shit not another person potentially banned for no reason lmao
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gore_ https://forum.plutonium.pw/topic/43137/concern-about-a-recent-ban
Since 3 days ago unfortunately. Only reason I'm not losing my mind over this atm lol, is because I actually have another PC I can (hopefully) use safely. But the fact that I even have to tho...
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DirkRockface you can specifically help by pc checking people who claim to be falsely banned instead of just being like "hey, im sorry cant do anything about it" or "youve been banned for a reason" when false flags happens in other games all the time, plutonium is no exception to this
also id like to argue that even though contributors have to follow the same rules as normal people, that doesnt make you like us, this is because contributors have more contributions than other people, even having access to early builds of plutonium that we dont have, youre normal in the sense of having to follow the rules and not having the powers the actual staff has, but youre not normal in the sense of that you have early access builds
finally, i want to point out that while you do point out the anti-cheat document, it actually has flaws in the document, here are a few examples that i see:
"Plutonium has an anti-cheat that was completely custom made by our developers. While we cannot divulge
information on how it works, we can confidently say that it works as we have thwarted over 20,000 cheating attempts! It will never catch everything but it most people agree that is does a better job than some others out there."not only do we not know what percentage of the 20,000 cheating attempts are actual cheating attempts vs false flags, the source is outdated by 4 years with the latest update to the anti-cheat detection graph being on july 31, 2021
"We will not provide any information regarding any given ban, remember you broke our rules."
this is a bad argument, as again, false flags has happened in other games and so did this, even disregarding other games, gore's proof shows him just regularly playing on leetin servers before he was perma banned
also in that doc, it gives out a list of things that can get you banned which is nice, but it only gives a "following but not limited to" list instead of a full list in which when several people are claiming to be falsely banned, dont you think whoever made the anti-cheat forum can make it a full list so people know what to avoid when playing on the client?
obviously, there is no shade and i understand that youre not staff so your power is limited, but there are ways you can help contribute to helping with the anti-cheat problem beyond what the staff can control, i hope you can take my argument into consideration, if you have any questions feel free to ask me
you can specifically help by pc checking people who claim to be falsely banned
A âPC checkâ is not a solution. Itâs not reliable, itâs not verifiable, and staff will not treat it as evidence. Us contributors have zero moderation authority, zero access to ban data, and zero ability to influence a ban decision. Even if we spent hours digging through a strangerâs system, as Dirk said there is no way to confirm what was injected or running before recording, and no way to guarantee the findings arenât manipulated. That alone makes it a direct attack vector for cheaters trying to slip back in. No community project is going to build its ban decisions on volunteer forensics.
This is a community run client. No community project has people donating their personal time to audit every person who claims a false ban. Even if we wanted to, we arenât equipped to. Plutonium supports Windows officially, but people also play on Linux and even macOS through various translation layers and methods. PC checking across multiple OSes would require knowing each system deeply, and no volunteer is realistically going to learn forensic procedures for three environments just to review strangersâ machines. This isnât infrastructure a small project can maintain.
false flags happen in other games all the time, plutonium is no exception
Correct, false flags exist in every anti-cheat. The difference is that major studios have full-time anti-cheat teams, telemetry pipelines, and internal tools for investigating them. Plutonium has a small dev team, a handful of outsourced people, and limited personal time and money. They maintain this project as a hobby. Expecting studio-level investigative support from volunteers working on a free client is unrealistic.
it actually has flaws in the document
Agreed. Many docs are outdated. That happens because the team is small and the workload is large. The documentation is being rewritten, but a small project cannot update everything instantly. Outdated docs are one of the most common pain points when helping users, and itâs not an issue of people not caring; itâs an issue of bandwidth and physical ability.
dont you think whoever made the anti-cheat forum can make it a full list so people know what to avoid
A full list isnât realistically possible. This anti-cheat is custom, old, and restricted by the engine it runs on. Detection behavior changes as OS updates, drivers, overlays, recording tools, and injectors evolve. The OBS example is a perfect example: the idea of recording software being bannable would not have been a consideration when the AC was written. Old game, old engine, limited hooks. Detection shifts over time as PCs change. A complete list wonât ever exist.
And contributors having access to early builds doesnât mean we are ânot normal users.â Early builds are test builds, nothing more. No elevated permissions, no access to ban systems, no internal controls. Weâre also kept in the dark on nearly everything outside testing new features, and even that barely happens because people have real lives, there's maybe 3-5 people each testing session before updates come out. It's really hard to catch things within the game, never mind doing that for the AC.
Every point you listed has already been discussed with higher ups over the years. Theyâve acknowledged them, proposed theories, proposed fixes, and adjusted things when possible. The problem isnât awareness, itâs manpower. There are very few devs with the ability to work on the codebase, and they only have limited time. Thatâs reality, not negligence.
Noise from the community doesnât create new staff. It doesnât generate new hours in a day. It doesnât force infrastructure to appear. Tagging a staff member doesnât give contributors influence over decisions; it just pings someone who responds when they have time.
Point is, this is a free project run by a small team in their spare time. They have jobs, families, school, and their own lives. Expecting them to provide full investigative tools, PC audits, appeal systems, perfect documentation, or instant anti-cheat fixes is entitlement. Being inconvenienced by a false ban doesnât create an obligation for volunteers to deliver studio-level support. Itâs not how a project of this scale can operate.
So please, stop being so ignorant and entitled. I understand it sucks, but nothing can be perfect. -
you can specifically help by pc checking people who claim to be falsely banned
A âPC checkâ is not a solution. Itâs not reliable, itâs not verifiable, and staff will not treat it as evidence. Us contributors have zero moderation authority, zero access to ban data, and zero ability to influence a ban decision. Even if we spent hours digging through a strangerâs system, as Dirk said there is no way to confirm what was injected or running before recording, and no way to guarantee the findings arenât manipulated. That alone makes it a direct attack vector for cheaters trying to slip back in. No community project is going to build its ban decisions on volunteer forensics.
This is a community run client. No community project has people donating their personal time to audit every person who claims a false ban. Even if we wanted to, we arenât equipped to. Plutonium supports Windows officially, but people also play on Linux and even macOS through various translation layers and methods. PC checking across multiple OSes would require knowing each system deeply, and no volunteer is realistically going to learn forensic procedures for three environments just to review strangersâ machines. This isnât infrastructure a small project can maintain.
false flags happen in other games all the time, plutonium is no exception
Correct, false flags exist in every anti-cheat. The difference is that major studios have full-time anti-cheat teams, telemetry pipelines, and internal tools for investigating them. Plutonium has a small dev team, a handful of outsourced people, and limited personal time and money. They maintain this project as a hobby. Expecting studio-level investigative support from volunteers working on a free client is unrealistic.
it actually has flaws in the document
Agreed. Many docs are outdated. That happens because the team is small and the workload is large. The documentation is being rewritten, but a small project cannot update everything instantly. Outdated docs are one of the most common pain points when helping users, and itâs not an issue of people not caring; itâs an issue of bandwidth and physical ability.
dont you think whoever made the anti-cheat forum can make it a full list so people know what to avoid
A full list isnât realistically possible. This anti-cheat is custom, old, and restricted by the engine it runs on. Detection behavior changes as OS updates, drivers, overlays, recording tools, and injectors evolve. The OBS example is a perfect example: the idea of recording software being bannable would not have been a consideration when the AC was written. Old game, old engine, limited hooks. Detection shifts over time as PCs change. A complete list wonât ever exist.
And contributors having access to early builds doesnât mean we are ânot normal users.â Early builds are test builds, nothing more. No elevated permissions, no access to ban systems, no internal controls. Weâre also kept in the dark on nearly everything outside testing new features, and even that barely happens because people have real lives, there's maybe 3-5 people each testing session before updates come out. It's really hard to catch things within the game, never mind doing that for the AC.
Every point you listed has already been discussed with higher ups over the years. Theyâve acknowledged them, proposed theories, proposed fixes, and adjusted things when possible. The problem isnât awareness, itâs manpower. There are very few devs with the ability to work on the codebase, and they only have limited time. Thatâs reality, not negligence.
Noise from the community doesnât create new staff. It doesnât generate new hours in a day. It doesnât force infrastructure to appear. Tagging a staff member doesnât give contributors influence over decisions; it just pings someone who responds when they have time.
Point is, this is a free project run by a small team in their spare time. They have jobs, families, school, and their own lives. Expecting them to provide full investigative tools, PC audits, appeal systems, perfect documentation, or instant anti-cheat fixes is entitlement. Being inconvenienced by a false ban doesnât create an obligation for volunteers to deliver studio-level support. Itâs not how a project of this scale can operate.
So please, stop being so ignorant and entitled. I understand it sucks, but nothing can be perfect.Astrocule Is mostly correct. As much as I'd love to have a sleek dashboard with tons of metrics to be able to easily investigate things like this, that's simply not the reality.
I just pulled some stats (using raw database queries...), if all players who got banned in the last 30 days (131 players) were banned falsely, that'd work out to a ~0.07% false positive ratio. This seems to be slightly lower than average too, when comparing over a longer period of time.
Based on these numbers alone, I still wouldn't rule out the possibility of false positives, but it's going to be very hard for us to determine what the cause might be, given our limited data.
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Astrocule Is mostly correct. As much as I'd love to have a sleek dashboard with tons of metrics to be able to easily investigate things like this, that's simply not the reality.
I just pulled some stats (using raw database queries...), if all players who got banned in the last 30 days (131 players) were banned falsely, that'd work out to a ~0.07% false positive ratio. This seems to be slightly lower than average too, when comparing over a longer period of time.
Based on these numbers alone, I still wouldn't rule out the possibility of false positives, but it's going to be very hard for us to determine what the cause might be, given our limited data.
Eldor well could you please help me individually PLEASE. take some time i love pluto and ill legit show you on discord that i didn't cheat. i posted the video earlier in this thread with proof. i really just wanna get back onto the game and trickshot man. maybe you can look on my pc and see what is triggering it but i don't have any clue considering i have all my shit closed nor do i have any cheats for any other games on my computer? please help me out Eldor be my goat and free me until its backwards
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Astrocule Is mostly correct. As much as I'd love to have a sleek dashboard with tons of metrics to be able to easily investigate things like this, that's simply not the reality.
I just pulled some stats (using raw database queries...), if all players who got banned in the last 30 days (131 players) were banned falsely, that'd work out to a ~0.07% false positive ratio. This seems to be slightly lower than average too, when comparing over a longer period of time.
Based on these numbers alone, I still wouldn't rule out the possibility of false positives, but it's going to be very hard for us to determine what the cause might be, given our limited data.
Eldor Unfortunate... but I understand. As I also told Dirk myself, this is about what I expected, hence why I didn't desperately beg for a solution to this issue myself. Well, that, and the fact that playing on something else is an option for me to hopefully prevent this from happening again.
That said, thank you for posting this. I do hope though, while you made it clear that as it stands right now it's impossible, that sometime in the future this could actually be something that's possible to look into. Honestly lol, I would even be willing to pay if it meant not having to live in fear of randomly losing access to this project forever
