Since some smart kids (banned from the server meanwhile) started spamming the teamspeak server, we now installed user levels on the Teamspeak Server. Please read the Chat Page on the website for more info and on how to get your user level.

I have installed some basic plugins now and enabled the cross-server chat! Yay!

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.

I have made a new flowchart and inserted it on the shop page that should explain the shop and how it works a bit better. Some new people thought that the shop is like on other servers buying anything or selling everything, and the difference between buy & request, sell & offer was maybe not really clear from the first instance to everyone. Comments welcome.

I have revamped the server’s user list just now to be more consistent with the look & feel of other lists that we have. On the bottom of the list we now also have a small statistic list about user levels etc.

If You click on a username you can see additional info such as screenshots of their lots, karma etc etc.

I now made a full karma list on the website’s karma page. Also, banned users are not shown anymore.

You can now vote on the roller coaster contest. Since most of them are really large and half-buried underground I did not copy them anywhere. Please just fly there and try them out!

I took another random look at the log files and found Cheezedogg using Xray, and banned him of course. Please note that I have another couple of people of whom I know that they are using Xray, just waiting to meet them online. Do not think that I won’t catch you just because I have not had the satisfaction of having you confronted with it.

I have now created a new First Aid page that should help people solve diverse issues when I or Elders are not around. On top of this I created an emergencies thread on the forum that I would like to ask Elders and Masters to subscribe to by clicking the “Notify me of follow-up replies via email” checkbox on the bottom of the page. When someone then has an issue, you will get an email. If you fixed the issue, please post another entry to the thread so others know that they do not need lot login anymore.

I currently have towny installed and it keeps to be a recurring issue creating lag. The author of the plugin does not get it fixed. The issue is that towny keeps taking processor time even in worlds where it is disabled. Therefore I will abandon the plugin to the favor of precious stones in the hope that this will work better.

What will be the consequences? Sometimes on Tuesday/Wed next week, all protections in the darklands and nether done by towny will be disabled. I will introduce new, simple (probably chunk-size blocks) of protection through the preciousstones plugin.

I also want to finally open the kingdom for playing. The issue here is that we have a choice of waiting for the coming update with larger biomes. One proposal could be that we start a temporary map once 1.3 comes out with large biomes and make that the kingdom once we can integrate it into the system.

The alternative would be that we create the kingdom now, normal biomes, and do the same thing with the darklands instead. Opinions?

I managed now to implement a basic Karma system, just like reddit. You can give 0,1,-1 karma to a user as long as he is settler and more than 10 days registered on the website. To find out the commands please go to the brand new Karma page on the website.

For those who are wondering about the subjects of the last 3 posts please see this here.

Further, as you can see down here on the left, there is also a new karma-like system on the website. I dumped the facebook/twitter thing and opted for a site-specific feature so people can leave their opinion about stuff w/o having to link their facebook account to the site and leave a simple opinion. So click away and give karma as you like!

After the great feedback from many people I want to give a second attempt to the topic, taking in consideration the worries and additional ideas that were mentioned. I want to start with a different description this time:

Scenario 1:

Imagine you have a karma account. People can give and take karma away from you, depending if they like what you do or if they do not like what you do. The karma is shown to other users so you can show off if you have a lot of karma. People can give you karma for whatever reason, but it is invisible to you who gave you karma – or who took it. The karma given to you expires after 3 months – per each point. You also get some karma for getting ranked on a contest. Karma is only relevant in dimensions such as 10-50, 50-75 etc. Having 1 or 5 karma more or less should not make an impact.

You can also give karma to other people. In order to do so, you get a karma spending account that is dependent on your online time, your level and the karma you received from others. You can use that karma as positive or negative to other people. Giving karma on top of that costs you a little money. So you have to decide if you rather give karma or buy that diamond pickaxe.

Scenario 2:

Imagine we are reddit. You can give one karma or take one karma from every user. That’s it. You have unlimited karma to give or to take – but in the end you can only do a “like” or “dislike” once per user. Everyone the same. Easy and simple. No expiries, no allowances – just like reddit.

The consequence:

For that would be the end of the story. A little bling for you if you are good and nice or maybe not so much if you are controversial. If you are purely bad and annoying to everyone, you might even have negative karma. In the end, having no karma is normal, having a lot is good, and having negative is bad. But if there is a balance of people liking you and disliking you, you will simply be the standard – no karma.

When I as an admin look at people’s karma, I would point my attention to those with the most or the least karma and think if a promotion or maybe a ban is in order. Or I just ignore it. Since

Opinions wanted.