i think the global ban will be a bad idea, you cant let admins add people to the list because they could add anyone for no reason and even the anti cheat had its problems in race so that wouldnt work either
firstly, run testcon.mrc and tell me if that works, if it doesnt then it is usually because your host doesnt allow remote connections to the sql server or because you are trying to connect to the wrong address
the team never says anything about the release date, usually because we dont know who will be around to do the coding and if any bugs will pop up that take some time to fix