[backwards]

I do agree with you now after reading your response. I was under the impression that this would just be used to display a neat colorized message in chat and maybe a sound to make the banned player event more boldly defined. This was a really naive assumption. The concern of someone else using this "VAC" substring code for events to add bans to public databases like source bans would be a really bad idea. Anyone stumbling upon this thread for code snippet references should use the approach to scan the whole string to validate it's the correct message. Degrading someones name on a public forum due to incompetence of proper programming would be pretty bad. If it weren't for this factor i'd still disagree. That being stated I wouldn't trust a disconnect message as they can be customized with reasons for disconnection from the server. For this particular case of using the information provided to prevent the player from then using commands on a webpage would be a bad idea. For instance what if the player times out right before the vac ban is issued? Then the server wouldn't be notified. You should be handling this security check for vac bans on the webpages side by querying the steamids steam community page info.