Author Archives: uncovery

About uncovery

Owner & admin of this server.

New lottery prizes!

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The voting lottery has now 2 new prizes:

  • a small (0.1%) chance to win a free deposit slot
  • a medium (1%) chance to win a vanity title saying “I won the lottery!” for randomly 7-14 days.

Thanks to LukeCreative for suggesting it. Good luck!

Story signs now allow user mode changes

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You can now switch people to Adventure / Creative / Survival modes with story signs. Creative mode works only in Flatlands & City of course. Please note that people do not switch automatically back to Creative in creative worlds once they are in adventure mode.

So in your stories, please make the last sign so that they switch back to the right mode. There are new signs now in City spawn that allow people to change their modes manually.

New /vote command & IRC back online

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We now have a /vote command that lists all the voting websites (provided you can vote already).

I will work on this command so it will also tell you when you can vote next, but for now it just shows the available links.

Also, IRC is back up. It still throws errors on the console when someone logs in, but that does not affect users in any way,

Voting stats now live

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I have now added a voting statistic to the users list. It’s also visible in the /who command. It shows if a user was active on the server for a number of days and voted for the same number of days. The significant amount of people who did not vote at all despite being active on the server is showing that we need to do something to incentivize voting more than just the 100 Uncs & lottery.

Some people in chat already proposed a voting competition of sorts, but I am afraid that this will reward the top-voters to vote more, but not those who otherwise never vote. Any suggestion on getting people to vote more are welcome.

[Update] Something that I decided to do is create an achievement list like the one in-game where you get rewards for doing something for the first time. Like this we can incentivize new users to try out voting, shopping, depositing etc. and at the same time teach them about server features.[/update]

Server list votes

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Here a quick statistic about server votes:

In the last 12 months, we got 783 referrals from minecraft-server-list.com where we used to have a very prominent 2nd place in the “whitelisted” category.That is 65 per month, 16 per week. In the last 2 weeks however, we got only 7. That’s one quarter of what we were used to. Why? There are more and more larger servers pushing into this space, and we are now ranked 5.

We currently have in average 40 unique players per day. If everyone of them voted, we could have had 440 votes on that list, which would rank us #3.

So one thought to fix it is to give higher incentives to vote a specific server list where we think that the impact is highest. We could introduce to not being able to do certain things on the server if you have not voted for that one list in the last 48 hours, for example usage of the deposit, shop or other things. Being able to be ranked up for example.

I am not 100% certain about this, but it’s a very tempting proposition.

Opinions?

 

Off-topic updates

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Hey everyone! I am sure you all realized that I have not been working on the server lately. The main reason is that I am very busy at work together with the fact that I decided more than half a year ago that I wanted to change how I work on my other hobby, photography.

The issue with my photography was that I used to do all kinds of photography, but in the last 2 years I start focusing more and more on live music and dive photography. I also got some new equipment (= strobes / flash setup) end of last year for underwater photos which dramatically increased the amount of decent shots that I could take during a dive. From maybe one nice photo per dive to a dozen or more. It’s darker than one thinks down there and strobes make a huge difference. I also took a class in post-production. So I had a lot of photos that I wanted to publish but no platform to properly do so. My old “portfolio” website where I used to post the best 30-40 pictures I had ever taken was not really made for this kind of stuff, and uploading every photo individually was just not feasible. So I had to look for a new system and eventually decided that I needed to write it myself.

So I have been working for the last 6 months on that new system, on and off. There were some technical difficulties that I ran into, which took me several months to resolve, but once I finally got over those, I could make some faster progress. So the news is that I finished the software finally. It consists out of 2 parts:

One part that allows me to upload a lot of images in one batch and the system automatically sorts them by date, creates previews and then lets me include them into a blog post by simply defining the times pan of the photos I want to see. That’s ideal for live music since a band plays for a certain time as well as for diving, since a dive takes a certain time, and I want to see all photos during that time span.

The second part allows me to download data from my dive computer (depth, time & temperature) and plot it as a graph. It also reads the photo information of the above system and shows them on the graph. This gives a very nice picture of a dive that is otherwise not possible. All I need to do is define which dive I want to see and if the dive computer and the camera time did not match 100%, I just say by how much.

So I can just make a dive, upload the photos and one file from my computer, enter 2 lines of text into my blog and all is done. Hardly any work and it looks good.

So today, I finally finished working uploading recent live music photography and my recent dives and published the websites. If you want to see them, they are reachable at

http://hongkong-rocks.com and https://uncovery.net (you can guess which is which?)

What’s left to do now is to publish the first system and to clean up the second one, then potentially publish that as well. They are both 100% open-source projects. Once that is done, I can focus on working on the minecraft server again.