How Do I Prevent Lan Party Theft? 758
DragonTHC writes "I'm thinking about hosting a lan party open to the public. I'm aiming for approximately 60 people to attend. I can handle all the logistics of operation. The only thing I can't wrap my head around is: how do I prevent theft at the lan party? Do I hire security guards? Do I need security cameras? I don't know the people who will attend, and I don't know if they're trustworthy enough to not steal other people's equipment. What do I do?"
How many people at the party do you know? (Score:4, Interesting)
Delegate "security" to a dozen or so people you do know.
Host it somewhere else. (Score:3, Interesting)
Find an internet cafe' and see if you can rent it out. Most cafe's will let you for a fee.
Have everyone pitch in a few bucks and you should be fine.
Theres a place that lets you do that here in Dallas.
Re:Insurance? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's really disappointing ... I've seen this argument stop lots of events from happening...
Public Liability insurance is not expensive for this sort of affair...
if you hold the event in a hotel or other such place then most straight forward issues could be covered by the hotels insurance...
Also, 20178 is pretty low... so your probably old enough to have actual assets worth suing over, where as students and younger people aren't as big a target.
No assets, no point suing.
Re:Nothing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Tag everything ! (Score:1, Interesting)
This is unnecessary. A disclaimer is a good start. But I would just take a photo of each person and their stuff during registration. Have one person always watching the door. No equipment leaves without checking the photo to the person.
Re:Insurance? (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, if you have medical coverage, your insurance company will sue them to try to recoup as much of what little those suited bastards paid the hospital to begin with. Apparently, collecting your monthly insurance tithe isn't profitable enough. God forbid you should actually have to use your insurance.
Oops. /rant
Re:Insurance? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow. That's the first time I ever saw UID used as an estimator of age. That's pretty entertaining. I guess it's more of a lower bound, but still....
Re:Insurance? (Score:5, Interesting)
Either that or you've had enough experience to not have faith in humanity...
For instance, my car was recently rear-ended by a woman in an SUV in some heavy traffic while I was stopped. There was a chain reaction and I hit the car in front of me. The woman agreed that all damage was her fault so I decided that we could let the police report slide as no one was injured. That was all good and well until 8:30 the next morning when her insurance company had called me to tell me that she claimed I had hit the car in front of me prior to her hitting me. Granted, if you could see pictures of the damage to the front of my car you'd realize quickly that there is no way she could have seen the damage to the front end of my car. But now me and my insurance company are taking it to court. I think we have a solid case but still the paper work alone makes it worth the time to cover your ass. And if I do lose the case? My insurance company is going to be eating a bill they shouldn't have and I'm going to be out of my deductible.
Faith in your fellow human is fantastic until some fucktard comes along and shows you that, yes Virgina, there are pricks in this world. And to think that this is a simple auto accident. Had there been an injury? God only knows what I'd be putting up with right now.
Re:Insurance? (Score:5, Interesting)
do you graybeards have a script that scrapes slashdot for the string 'uid' in user comments? i honestly can't think of how else there's such a high correlation for all the 'uid' posts to garner so many old-timers.
Re:Insurance? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hah, It would be interesting to see how strong the age/uid correlation would be. I'm probably a hundred years old by slashdot standards.
Re:Insurance? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's just statistics. There are probably 30K active accounts with UIDs low enough to qualify as 'graybeards'. If even one sees the comment, you get a satisfactory reply. Also, most people have the filter set to promote comments from long term users, so again, once you get one low uid post, you drastically increase the odds of getting another.
You're focusing on the wrong thing (Score:1, Interesting)
(posting as AC in case some fool decides to cause some trouble at one of my events.)
I'm part of a large-ish team (10 people) hosting LANs for between 120 and 250 people. We've been hosting events every 6 months for the past 6 years.
The closest we ever came to a theft was when a sponsor marquee went missing. Turns out this marquee was of a very expensive foldable design and cost almost $2k. We put an announcement out on the PA and 5 minutes later we had the marquee back. The guy who took it thought it'd be OK to souvenir it. Whatever, he owned up in the end.
We had another guy tell us some people were going to turn up who were not his friends but came from his school. Apparently they had a reputation for vandalism. When the group of 6 arrived, one of our organisers simply told them it'd be $5 each if they wanted to stay and watch. They sighed and left.
Apart from that, we've had... nothing. 6 years of fun and nothing close to what you're stressing about.
It's more important to run a high quality event: create goodwill up-front so no-one leaves with a grudge. Don't forget that if someone's attending a LAN, they've got disposable income (therefore aren't desperate to steal/sell goods) and their personality is reasonably social (or soon will be - I admit to learning lots of my social skills from lanning). Make sure your venue has one entry/exit (unlock a second door but have it alarmed - this will pass your fire safety check). Have a roster of staff by the door so someone's always there. Say goodbye to people and talk to them as they leave - it's a great way to add to your atmosphere (you can even give out leaflets about your next event) - you will notice if someone's acting suspicious. Check if your insurance covers theft (it probably won't, but if it does - great.) In other words, take reasonable precautions but don't pull out any hair.
I'll add that I've gone to hundreds of other public LANs besides the dozen or so I've run. The only thing that's ever happened is 2 PCs (not mine, but people in my group) went missing overnight at a 1000-person LAN 5 years ago. The people whose PCs were stolen had gone home overnight without telling us. If I leave my desk I get a friend to watch out for my stuff - but they are rarely watching properly. Someone could come up and take my stuff, but they haven't yet. I leave out my phone, my DVDs, my cordless keyboard and mouse, mouse-pad... the list goes on. It hasn't been stolen at a LAN.
Re:Insurance? (Score:5, Interesting)
do you graybeards have a script that scrapes slashdot for the string 'uid' in user comments?
No. It may sound incredible but there are people who are still reading slashdot even after that many years.
Re:Insurance? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that liability insurance shouldn't be a deterrent but, AFAIK, those little 'anti-liability' sheets you sign never actually hold up in court. It is sort of like how having a "Beware of Dog" sign makes it more likely that you'll be successfully sued should your dog cause harm to someone. If you've put the sign out it means that you knew that the dog was a danger.
IANAL though but giving out a generic form would likely lessen the chances of people actually believing they can sue should something untoward happen. I don't think that they mean much more than that in reality.
Re:Insurance? (Score:3, Interesting)
The better question is, "what's the lowest Slashdot ID that you ditched and moved on from."
I can't remember, nor can I remember how many accounts I've created here. At least a dozen. Almost all of them had +1 karma when I ditched them. NONE of them had been modded down to -1.
You get sick of the way people stalk your accounts like dogs sniffing butts, so you ditch the account, take a little time off, and come back with a new one. I mean, I can't imagine what a dull life it would be still having my first ID here...
I guess some people think that's cool or something, though.
Re:Nothing (Score:3, Interesting)
I regularly run LAN parties at my school and very few things ever go missing. I might come home from one short a network cable, but its not a big deal to me. I wouldn't worry too much about pricey things unless your supplying it. Its kinda obvious if someone is walking away with 2 monitors when they came in with one.
No, it's really not. Not with the stuff people bring to lanparties ... Multiple machines sometimes, and crazy amounts of gear. A guy with 2 monitors is seen often enough, and a guy with 2 monitors on a cart is seen a lot to -- carrying stuff out for their friends/clans. Legitimately.
People will generally look after their own possessions. What i would worry about is the venue. If you leave a big mess after, you're responsible for it.
That's a given. With larger lanparties, plan at least one day of cleanup. With really large lanparties, at least two.
Re:Insurance? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Insurance? (Score:4, Interesting)
I sometimes wonder how many people are actually in my general neighborhood from that timeframe... it could be nice to meet those people and see what they do... I know /. and a lot of the "old-timers" motivated me to do what I do now: full time linux systems administration. Sometimes I really long for the old insightful discussions on kernel features in the latest build or some networking issue/technology that was really disseminated in the discussion, with some of the greatest minds (like one of the architects of the protocol/RFC/kernel feature discussed) joining in the conversation.
Maybe it would be fun to have a Slashdot Archive topic, where special news items from ~5 years ago can be discussed again (with the old comments also available), so you can see how technology has progressed and how this may have been predicted in the comments.