You all probably noticed that I have not been around a lot. The issue is that I am extremely busy at work at least until the end of May. I am planning to upgrade soon to the latest minecraft version and then to do the promised upgrades to enable username changes.

When that will happen, I cannot say right now. I hope I will get down to upgrading the server someday in the next 1-3 weeks and then later do the name change upgrade, maybe in June.

What I have to do for the upgrade is essentially run a test with all the recently updated plugins. If that runs well, it’s a 2-3 hour work.

So sorry that I have not been showing myself a lot, but right now I have hardly time to spend at home even.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• camerissan (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• ImaWeezul (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)
• sleepystrangekid (from DesignerDonatorPlus to MasterDonatorPlus)

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Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• chenoa (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

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Mojang is preparing right now for people to be able to change their username. Instead of a username, people will have long, random code (called UUID, for example “87a39b0fd47b445dbd2e9ff86f0c70d3”) that will ensure their identity. They username will be just a kind of nickname which will not matter to minecraft anymore for identifying users.

While this is nice for minecraft, this is an issue for us since we store the username also in many databases and most prominently on this blog and forum to identify users.

In order to deal with this, there are several steps required:

• Make the custom-written code UUID-aware. Whenever some of the code is called that we wrote ourselves, it has to know the current username AND the UUID of the users. This is done already.
• Track username changes. The custom code has to be able to update it’s database whenever someone logs in after changing their username and potentially even keeps a history of usernames to be able to track actions back properly.
• Upgrade the minecraft and all plugins as they are released and start working with UUID instead of usernames. This is work in progress. The first plugin was released already. I also have tested briefly all the existing plugins with the new minecraft version and there does not seem to be a huge break in the system. So we might be able to upgrade to the latest minecraft version soon.
• Make the custom-written code able to deal with changing usernames. This is a major issue, since we store a LOT of information based on usernames. All the tables will have to be updated to use the UUID instead. This is a major coding effort that has to be done before we can upgrade to 1.8, whenever that is released.
• Make the blog UUID aware. We cannot continue to allow people to manage their lots, karma or other things on the blog if the username on the blog is not always the same as in the game. So we have to replace the logins of all users with their UUID, and then manipulate the login form so that you can enter the current username, the blog will then retrieve your UUID from the database and use that as your actual login. Instead of your userlogin, your nickname field will then be updated with your changing username as we go, so people can recognize commenters with their username instead of their UUID. This is the only way to ensure that your permissions and ownerships are safeguarded while you change your username over time.

So, as you can see, there is quite some work ahead with this. I am not sure when I will have time to work on all this, but the fact that I have now, after thinking about it for several days, come up with a comprehensive strategy to make this work out at all is a huge progress for myself. There are still a couple of things I am scratching my head over but hope I will see the solution once I start working on it before I go bald. One challenge for example is to deal with individual databases upgrading themselves along with plugins to be UUID-based instead of username based and my code having to be flexible enough to deal with the transition without me closing down the whole system for some hours of testing each time.

CHANGE YOUR MINECRAFT PASSWORD – WHY

A recent exploit found in OpenSSL (an open-source security socket layer, meant to secure/encrypt internet traffic) called “Heartbleed“, made it possible for hackers to find and use passwords on systems using OpenSSL.

WAIT, MOJANG WAS HACKED?

No, Mojang was not hacked. Their servers are not vulnerable to the OpenSSL exploit, but the load balancers they use from Amazon were. As a precaution, it has been recommended that you update your Minecraft password, just to be sure.

Mojang said:

WAIT – DO I CHANGE MY MINECRAFT PASSWORD, MOJANG PASSWORD, OR BOTH?

If you have not migrated your account, change your password at Minecraft.net.
If you have migrated your account, change your password at Mojang.com.

Uncovery.me never used the affected versions of OpenSSL, so nothing to do here.

Regardless of whether you have or have not migrated, it is crucial to change your password.

I have calculated that the server has a severe crash about every half a year. It normally results in people losing a lot of inventory or parts of the map being reset. If we have a crash about every six month, the next one is due around May. In order to prevent these crashes to come as a surprise, I will schedule the next crash for the coming weekend and thus prevent one in May.

So we will delete around 50% of all inventories, reset some random lots and wipe about 30% of the Unc accounts on the server come this weekend. The % chance of something happening to you will increase by the level of annoyance you showed during the last 30% of chat multiplied with the time you have spent on the server.

In order to give a better service to the users, you can already now ask for refunds, which I will of course refuse. I am sure that this will reduce the annoyance and shock for the users in case their stuff is gone, increase reliability and general satisfaction with the server.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• chrispypancake (from DesignerDonatorPlus to MasterDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Minecart Mania started to spew hundreds of pages of error messages into the logfile on any interaction on the server. I disabled it now, I have to find out how to fix this and will enable it again then.

I have added a desert lot that was designed by TBrewda to the lot manager to be available for flatlands owners.
Thanks to tbrewda for the proposal and the design of the lot!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• tarajlh (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

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Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• khyddinamaani (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)
• Akium (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I have imported all the old courier emails now into the new system. If you have sent an email or read an incoming one, I put it into your trashcan, otherwise it would flood the inbox when opening it.

Please check if there are messages missing. I am not sure I got the most recent backup since the system went down.

I am still having issues re-enabling the courier system. It causes errors and I will have to track down the source of the issue by setting up a parallel server.

I am half tempted to write a custom messaging system, that one would then work via website and commands and give up the enderman delivery and reading it on maps. In case I go that far, I can still spawn a creeper next to people who send emails…

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• dueldragonoid (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I created a new channel in the chat which is a Notifications channel for less important announcements. This will include the Voting Lottery announcements and also newly introduced announcements for new forum posts and replies. The new channel has the same chat color as the “off-topic” channel, yellow.New blog posts will be announced now in the Announcement channel by default.

As the title says… nothing spectacular but I thought I tell you guys.

I tried around how to best represent if a user is an active one or not and came to the solution to display a user’s average minute since he joined the server on the user list. Since we only record the online time since November 2013, any user who joined before that is only measured since that time of course. If you have been absent for the last week, this time is also counted so absence decreases your online time.

I found it quite interesting to see how active some of the new users are, and I think this number should also play a role in the promotions decisions.

I have just finished copying the larges builds in the city to the kingdom. The rest will be copied in the coming days, but I do not worry to find spots for them.
You can find now Rome, the underwater city, the castle, Egypt and the major portion of the spawn in the kingdom.