What Is PBBans and How Does Its Anti-Cheat Streaming Work?

PBBans is an anti-cheat community for PunkBuster-enabled games. It gives server admins and leagues a shared global ban list, and its PBBans Hub lets a single server stream cheat evidence to multiple anti-cheat sites at once, with live banning and live banlist updates. You'd use it if you run or manage a PunkBuster server and want bans to propagate across the wider anti-cheat network rather than staying local to your own server.

Who PBBans serves

• Server admins — stream their servers to PBBans so bans and config checks apply network-wide.
• Leagues — use the ban and config indexes to vet players and teams.
• Players — can check their own GUID, see whether they're globally banned, and appeal a ban.

How the PBBans Hub works

The Hub is the streaming layer. Instead of pointing your server at one anti-cheat site, you point it at the Hub, which relays your server's PunkBuster data to multiple anti-cheat sites. According to PBBans, this "multi-streaming" approach is what makes it possible to feed several ban lists from one server configuration.

The Hub also handles:

• Live banning — bans issued while the server is running take effect without a restart.
• Live banlist updates — your server's ban list refreshes as new bans arrive.
• Live ban removals — bans that are overturned are pulled from the list in the same live fashion.

PBBans states that setup "usually only takes 15 minutes or less from the time you apply until your server is streaming," and points new admins to its Beginners Guide as the starting point.

The indexes, explained

PBBans maintains several searchable indexes. The names are easy to confuse, so here's what each covers:

The site's own statistics give a sense of scale: 410,140 MBI entries, 58,756 unofficial MBI entries, 105,906 cached global bans, 27 streaming servers, 1,439 MLI entries, and 16,039 teams. These figures update every five minutes, so treat any number you see as a snapshot rather than a fixed total.

Checking a GUID or a streaming server

PBBans provides two lookup tools directly on its site:

• Check GUID — accepts an 8- or 32-character GUID and tells you whether that identifier appears in the ban data.
• Check Streaming Server — accepts an address in IP:port form, for example 69.168.58.45:17567, to confirm whether a server is streaming.

If you're a player who's been banned, the GUID check is the first step: it confirms the ban exists and which identifier it's attached to. From there, the Appeal A Ban option is the route to contest it.

Getting started streaming

The path PBBans describes is: apply, then follow the Beginners Guide to configure your server to stream to the Hub. The site also offers an Automated Hub Setup option and a Downloads section for the tooling involved. Because the Hub relays to multiple sites, you configure the connection once rather than repeating it per anti-cheat destination.

A practical note on why this matters: PBBans frames streaming as a collective effort — "the more servers that stream, the harder it will be for cheaters to find servers they can join." A single server's ban list only protects that server; a streamed ban list protects every server in the network.

Common points of confusion

• Hub vs. ban list — the Hub is the transport and live-update mechanism; the Master Ban Index is the record set it feeds.
• Official vs. unofficial MBI entries — PBBans tracks both separately, so a large MBI total doesn't mean every entry carries the same weight.
• Live vs. cached — live bans and banlist updates happen in real time through the Hub, while the "cached global bans" figure reflects what's currently held in the shared list.

If your goal is to protect a single server, local PunkBuster bans may be enough. If your goal is to participate in a shared ban network with live propagation across multiple anti-cheat sites, streaming to the PBBans Hub is the mechanism designed for that.