I have just created a new email system. It should replace courier for the long run. It’s not 100% finished and I would like to have feedback to it. It works similar to courier:

You have one draft that you start with /mail new <recipient> <title>. It will show you then the new draft with the ID it received.
You can optionally add text to it by using /mail text <message>.
You can send it with or without text using /mail send. If you want to cancel the draft (you cannot edit title or recipient so far) you need to delete it with /mail delete <id>.  Once the email is sent online users get a message that they got a mail, otherwise when they login. You can check the other commands with the /mail command.

Things to come:

• receive e-mail alerts (real email) when you get a mail from in-game while you are off-line
• have a message reader/editor on the website
• import of old emails from the courier system
• maybe I will phase out the ticket system
• maybe multiple recipients
• others?

What will not come?

• attachments (we have a deposit system already)
• sub-folders other than inbox, outbox, trash, draft

Please test this and tell me if you find any issues, bugs or improvement potentials. I will continue to work on it but I wanted to make this public as a beta so I can catch errors early.

The server crashed a couple of times. After the 3rd crash and attempt to restart it via my cellphone I made my way back from the beach to my PC to check the logfiles (don’t worry, I had other reasons to leave the beach…) and found that the new version of the IRC plugin made trouble. So I reinstalled the old version and restarted the server. Let’s see if that helped.

On unrelated news I tracked down a kingfisher on a crab hunt during the morning low tide on our beach:

And then, I caught a crab. They have 2 convenient handles here to hold them.

I now disabled minecarts from jumping if you make them go up a ramp. I realized that tight bends after an ascent would be impossible to take without the minecart leaving the track.

I have added some new upgrade vote stats to the voting page. Here are the current figures. New new stats are italic:

Vote Stats

• Overall proposals: 56
• Proposals per day: 0.6
• Overall votes: 631
• Votes per day: 6.8
• Proposal fail ratio: 13.73%
• Vote down ratio: 23.14%
• Max days for proposals to succeed: 48 days
• Avg days for proposals to succeed: 3.1 days

So far I did not have a function that would end a trivia game in case the quiz master would not ask all the questions. The game would be open and nobody had the chance to start another game.

I now changed that. In case someone tries to start a new game and there is one still open, and the quiz master of the open game is not online, the old game will be automatically closed, the winnings distributed and a new game is started by the new quiz master.

So if the quiz master is still online, please ask him/her to continue the quiz or to close it by skipping the remaining questions.

You can now get the player heads from the hunger games again. I found a new plugin that works with 1.7.4

Thanks to our returned-from-the-deadwork resident coder, azkedar, we have now fully re-enabled minecart spawning blocks as previously. Please refer to the respective page on the details. The reason why we could re-enable this is that azkedar changed our plugin that limits spawning of mobs to include vehicles. So you are allowed to have 10 minecarts per lot. Anything beyond that will trigger an alert and stop spawning the minecart.

For those who missed it: We disabled minecart spawning blocks because one could built a redstone contraption that would spawn hundreds in seconds.

I have upgraded the plugin again which is controlling all our custom plugins (among others shop & deposit) with the hope to enable enchanted books to be traded. Unfortunately. while the plugin now properly detects enchantments on books, it does not list the level of enchantment correctly yet. I contacted the author regarding this. Once we get the next version of the plugin, I hope this (last) bug will be fixed.

The minecart plugin that we are currently using is being rewritten form scratch, and today the first Alpha version was released. They have tons of new features that can allow us some nice tweaking and hopefully also faster updates in the future.

I will have to wait until a proper version is released but it seems we will be able to continue with the current plugin and then upgrade to a better version. Stand by!

With the help of Azkedar, we re-enabled the hunger games!

Check the hunger games help page for additional info!

There is now also a hunger kit to make a tree in case the seed is desert or ocean.

Hunger games will be out of order for the time being. There is an issue with permissions that I cannot figure out. I will try to find the time to fix it ASAP and re-enable it then.

Minecart Mania sign commands are now re-enabled. Please try it out carefully. If you see that the server laggs or other strange stuff is happening, please stop using it and post here what you did, the coordinates etc. so I can go there and test it myself.

The essentials plugin was fixed, and XP buying is now re-enabled! Let’s hope that nothing else broke with this update :)

I have now – at least temporarily – disabled mob limits. Instead I have added a layer where one can see on the map all the player-controlled mobs. You have to switch that on on the layer icon so you can see them.

I hope to get a bit more transparency of the mobs being loaded even though players are not there etc. I hope to get a deeper understanding of the server load through this. Please note that this feature is only for me to be able to debug and will disappear sooner or later.

I changed the mob limitations again to be much more generous. If you want to participate in the discussion and evaluate / change the settings, please join it over at the issue tracker.

The minecart plugin was updated. If you had some issues before like elevator height limits or launch sign directions, please check it again, it should work now.

You can now add the [player] tag into a story and it will show the user’s name in the text.

We are having a bug in the shop. The issue arises if you try to withdraw items that stack but in other quantities than 64. To fix this, I need a list of all stackable items that stack in lower amounts than 64 in the format of

item-id => stacksize, item-id => stacksize, item-id => stacksize,  etc

anyone?