There are many items that are existing in game, but which you cannot obtain in survival mode, such as a fire block. There are other items such as nether warts which have a block (115 in this example) and an item (372) that have a similar name, but only the item is available. The block is marked red in the wiki’s item list. Until now, if you searched for netherwart in the shop, it would show you item 115, but if you tried to buy it, it would not have any sellers. However, plenty of 372 are in the shop.

To stop this confusion, the shop now will warn you if you try to /find or /search for an unavailable block. It will also tell you if you put up a purchase request for one of these.

I just fixed the issue that some enchanted items cannot be retrieved from the shop. I fixed remaining enchanted items in the shop, so whatever is in the shop now with an enchantment, can be withdrawn without a problem.

I heard now several times that people were griefed by using switches to start harvesting mechanisms or luring away animals though open doors. The only way to stop that, would be to enable users to disable switches, as we do it in towny. There is an issue with that however:

In the empire, 100% of the area is covered by lots. Many of the lots have large builds or even walls. Most of the doors now are iron to keep the creepers out. If we allow blocking of switch-use, we run the risk that new users have to take massive detours to reach their lot due to closed doors.

Since the griefing is only occasional, I would recommend instead that you remove the switches and buttons that allow access to your most important assets and place them only when you use them once you see that you are a victim of griefing.

If we see that this is a more widespread issue, we can think also about alternative methods. At the same time I will see if we use a monitoring plugin so we can ban those users right away.

We have a new announcement channel! inQuish was kind enough to whip up a small plugin that lets our website backend and other services talk into a special channel on the server. Everyone automatically joins this channel, you cannot speak in it, and you cannot escape leave it… All stuff like the website updates and the restarts etc will be in this channel. The channel will also be broadcast to the IRC chat as soon as I figure out how to do that properly.

I updated the information how to contribute to the server on the help page. If you want to try out your programming skills or think that something on the server can be improved, please do not hesitate to contribute through the issue tracker. All info how you can do so is now on the help page.

We now have reached 2000 registered users! That means that 0.033% of all registered minecraft players have been on the server – if that means anything at all. It also means that in average we have 3 users per day registering on the website since it exists!

Well, whatever this means, I am happy about it and we hopefully can see this server grow even faster in the future!

I created a set of 12 new header images. As you can see, there is a frame set and a changing picture/logo combination. I hope you all like it. I am always happy to get new proposals of things to be included, mostly only things from the city though.

General proposals on how to make the website more unique without going all the way to the standardized minecraft look of so many other websites like the wiki would be great.

After reviewing the feedback from the recent survey regarding the shop, we’ve made some small changes to hopefully make it work better for everyone.

• /find, /list, and /cancel will now assume “offer” if you don’t specify request or offer. So /find cobblestone will work again.
• /offer can now take an optional “silent” argument anywhere to suppress the sales announcements, so you can avoid spamming when posting large quantities to the shop. For example: /offer 5 silent will post all of the item in your hand at a price of 5 and will not generate any announcement.
• /withdraw all can now be used to withdraw everything from the deposit. It will stop if it runs out of room in your inventory.
• /withdraw @sender can now be used to withdraw everything from a particular sender, for example my personal favorite:
  /withdraw @lottery

There were also some small changes to the help and error messages:

• /sell now reminds you that you might mean /offer instead when you don’t give a shop-id.
• All messages now omit /ws from the command syntax, except for /ws help where it is always required. Every other command can be written without /ws (though you can write it if you wish), and it’s shorter and clearer to write it that way.

Of course, please report any problems with the shop system that may arise. Thanks!