I have programed some new statistics that show the status of the server in some more figures. Here is the most important stuff.

• We have 3.6k people who did the whitelist test.
• 2k+ of those people (60% of registered) logged in on the server, Those who never logged in might be spam accounts, but they still did the whitelist. No idea yet what happened there. This surely deserves more investigation to find out why we are losing 40% of all users after the whitelist.
• 1109 users, 50% of those who logged in, are still guests and never became settlers. Some of them might have given up on the settler quiz, others came just to look around.
• We still have 623 lot occupants, so they have been online in the last 60 days, this means that almost 28% of all users that ever seen the inside of this server still are around! I think this is quite amazing!
• 40% of all logged in people  ‘only’ made it to settler level, 57% of them are still active
• 154 made stayed here for more than 2 months and became citizen, around 7% of those who logged in.
• We have 54 days in average online time per user. This is distorted of course by recent joiners and people who are here since 600+ days.

See the full statistics here.

I have now successfully implemented the donator auto-adjustment. Your userlevel will now reflect the new donator status. You will be able to see how long your donation lasts in the server status section on the right bar of the homepage. Your donations will remain secret to other players however. We had some upgrades and some downgrades due to the new system. If you think your new level is not correct, please comment here. If someone sees the user Audofrag, please ask him to contact me since I cannot track back his donation 100%.

Also, DonatorPlus level can now disguise as a mob, depending on the userlevel. Higher level can disguise as more mobs. Please see details on this feature on the Userlevels & Commands page.

I have now made a decision on the donators level topic I talked about in an earlier post. Some background:

I am paying for this server in cash, and I could use a much smaller & cheaper one if I would not be running a minecraft server. However, I do not rely on the donations to be able to afford it. I wont people to understand however that this stuff is not for free, and I want to make sure people do not take things for granted.

Further I want to make sure that a user that donated 2 USD 2 years ago gets a different level of appreciation than a user who donated 50 USD just yesterday. Also. I do not want to diminish the 2 USD since I know people give what they can, and not everyone has the same means available. So after listening to some comments in-game on the issue I made the following decision:

• People who donate get an eternal ‘+’ status. It’s a badge that you donated something – sometimes. This requires however that the amount you donated is higher than the fee Paypal takes. If you donate 1 Cent, I do not get any of it. Paypal takes it all. So no + for you.
• The amount I receive from the donation gets used up in a speed of 1 USD / Month. I rather round up here and count only full months. If you donated and still have donation leftover, you get a ++ status with all its privileges. I will add the mob-disguise plugin soon to those. So you can troll your friends by running around as a chicken etc. What mobs will be available? I do not know yet, let’s see. Maybe I keep the creeper for myself :D.
  Calculation Example: If you donated 12 USD 10 months ago, you would have 2 more months of ++ today. If you donated another 10 USD 2 months ago, you would have 10 months left. (12 – 10) + (10 – 2) = 10
• The level will adjust automatically like your citizen status
• There are only 4 people that will be “downgraded” by this change. 2 ++ donators who donated a long time ago and 2 + donators who donated less than required so that some money would be left over for the server.
• I still need to implement this all, so no changes as of this being published.

I have been thinking and trying out several things over the past few days and just wanted to share a bit.

• I have thought about how to deal with the skylands. Since many users simply flatten the ground and do not use it as skylands, and since the island structure seems perfect for group builds (like you need to build a bridge to get somewhere), it seemed a bit misused. I do not think however I will change the current skylands from what it is. Resetting lots is a bit of a pain since it often boots all users off the server, but I also do not want to create another world for skylands. maybe just an alternative hunger world scenario?
• I have been thinking of limiting donator status by 1USD / month. If you donate 1 USD, you are donator for one month. Every month, your level decreases by 1 USD. You need to keep a level of 12 USD to stay donator ++ level. The amount is calculated by what I get after Godaddy substracts their fee and now how much you spend. The question is what happens with a deposit slot if you loose your status? Would the system hand you the stuff automatically if you have space? Would you have a deadline to withdraw? That is a bit more complicated to do.
• Cake day is another idea. While I do not want to convert too much into reddit, we can give certain gifts on the 1st year (365 days) and the second. This will be possible with the above function since we would calculate how long a user has been online once a day and the donations etc. I am thinking of a nice set of diamond armor or something along the lines.

Nothing has been decided, just brainstorming.

When you win a random enchanted item from the voting lottery, you were in the past able to win enchanted chainmail. However, as we all know, chainmail is only available in creative mode. To stick with the general theme of keeping our survival mode as much as possible similar to vanilla survival mode, I now removed the chainmail. It has been there only due to an oversight on my side when I programmed the enchanting table for these goods.

I have now added a donation stats section to the server status on the right side bar of the frontpage. You can see for example today:

Server cost so far: 2835.00 USD
Donated amount: 1572.09 USD
Balance: 1262.91 USD

So the overall costs since the server is live is 2.8k USD and all the donations that came in since then made up for more than half of that! Thanks again to the donators!

As you can see from our newly designed users list, we now have over 600 lots occupied. So we had 600 people that were active on the server during the last 8 weeks. I consider this number one of the best indicators of the server health and am quite happy that this number continues to rise.

So thanks everyone for making this server what it is and have fun mining & crafting :D

When you give karma to someone, the system will tell you now if you give karma for the first time to that user and if not if you gave a different karma value before.