CTRA got sniped at fairly heavily for bagging the domain name raceauthority.com, being variously accused of arrogance and jumped-uppedness on several teams' forums. The truth is that we tried to get ctra.com but it was gone, but raceauthority.com was available for a fiver. So we plopped.. seemed too good to miss.
Man-hours are the most significant issue in any system that takes on the idea of creating a virtual version of the FIA. The second-most significant issue is compliance. CTRA were approached several times to oversee league administration, to manage appeals against league admin decisions as an independent adjudication process. We looked at it and felt that it could be viable. However, when push comes to shove there are many drivers out there that resent any self-appointed authority and who also are completely incapable of recognising the extent of their own utterly crap driving. In time, I came to refer to these people as "karters".
The Wrecker Barricade was the earliest cross-server system in LFS, pooling and distributing information about systematic wreckers to server operators. At the time it was launched it was desperately needed, going live within a couple of months of the BF1's release when in-server wrecking was at its worst. Over time, the need for the barricade fell away as standards in servers grew higher.
For a long time after any activity on the barricade had ended, the perceived threat of being "Barricaded" was more than enough to pull racers into line. Though I never felt comfortable with seeing the barricade's name being banded around in the form of a big-brother threat, there was no question that the net effect of the threat was positive on racing in the broader sense.
A virtual FIA in LFS would only work if it were driven by a clear, distinct need. I think that, largely, leagues do a fine job of managing standards on their own. If it became apparent that some substandard drivers are league-hopping like they used to server-hop in the days before the barricade, then maybe a system would be worth launching. But if it does launch, the system would work best if its operations were entirely transparent and if its decisions were broadly applied.
It would, I believe, also need to be entirely community-driven. The great plus with the barricade was that the system itself existed independently of the contributions submitted to it. The final decision to permit or deny entry into a server remained with the individual server operator, but at the same time (because the need was desperate and the server ops were frantic) ALL of the popular servers subscribed and actively participated. Unless all those factors were to come together, an FIA in LFS would be ineffective.
/2p
