Hi,
Some servers are switching people sprays with other peoples sprays, or they are adding their own custom sprays if they do not like yours.I thought it was just a bug until an admin started to get frustrated because his little prank was not working, and spilled the beans. They just go into the server cache, and tweak peoples images.Or get a null/blank TGA file and name it the same as your spray name,overwriting your spray file, so when you go to spray nothing happens.
To avoid this, is really easy. Just change your sprays file name before you start playing , and it will work for you every time
Be sure to choose a unique name every time , or the server will just revert your spray to the one they have cached.
I made a simple batch file to do this for me, and change my configure script so I don't have to manually load my image every time.
After work today, I might whip up a small python script to do this. That way I will not have to choose a name every time. It will just randomly generate one for me. i can also daisy chain it to my Fortress forever shortcut, so it automatically does everything for me on game launch.
Later when I have more time, I could make a script that lets you have a few custom sprays in a folder, and it either incrementally changes them every game, or have it randomly select one. (while still randomly naming them to defeat any prankster administrator from changing them.)
This will add a little time to your game connecting to the server, because it will have to upload the images every time. It will also fill the servers cache up with your image, so only do it before playing on servers you know do this.