Sorry about that, but while fixing the malls I must have shot a hole through the server map from the eastern outpost all the way to the spawn on sea level. It’s only 1 block large but it goes essentially through 7 lots. [Update] Contrary to the common belief that this happened from letting my shark with his laser eyes take his sunglasses off, it happened by myself looking in the direction for a second too long.[/Update] I hope it did not remove any chests filled of diamonds or flooded your area with Lava. If so, make a screenshot and I point and laugh at it. Yeah, sorry again, but still no refunds!

There seems to be a big with the /home command. I can fix the entries in the database manually if you tell me that you have problems.  Please post here if your home command does not place you exactly where you have set it.

I have just now relocated all the malls including their contents to the spawn. You have now a 9-storey tower there with all the lots represented. Please go and take a look. Please note that the original mall in the spawn was relocated one floor down. Look for the signs on the wall to know where your floor is.

There have been several server freezes over the last four days. The problem is that the freezes do not throw any conclusive message into the logfiles. So I need all your help on this. If you are online while the server freezes, please come to this post and tell me that it froze so I can restart it ASAP, what was the last thing you did before it happened. Did you see any odd behavior?
Thanks a lot!

Ok, I have read the comments, and thanks for those. They have given me a good perspective on the topics and I have an idea on how to move forward:

The malls

Instead of having split malls like now, I will rather combine them all at spawn. It is better to have a crowded central spawn than splitting up the people over the map. If we ever extend the map again and have a lot of people online permanently we can think about that idea again.

The /home command

I will leave the /home command as it is. If you die, you should not loose your stuff because it takes too long to get it.

The nether

This will depend how the portal making works. If making a portal from the nether does NOT make a portal in the normal world, I will make the whole nether public. If it creates a portal in the normal world, I will either make a portal command instead of people building them or split up the world in sections. Then I might also reset the nether regularly such as one a week or so.

I am currently waiting for the WorldGuard plugin to be updated. The new version was promised for last Friday, and I hope it will happen this week. The new version will introduce a very important new feature:

The Nether.

Actually, the nether is accessible technically already now. The problem however is that the nether is currently split up the same way as the normal world, in 100×100 lots. This is not bad as such but at the nether scales to the current world 1 – 8, this causes issues. If you walk 100 blocks in the nether, you will be 800 blocks away in the normal world. This means that if someone on the edge of the map builds a portal, he will come out on a protected lot of someone else and will have to walk again far to get to his protected lot. Building a lot there, would be miles out from the current map borders.

So the new version of said plugin will make it possible to have different (or none) lot allocations than the normal world and therefore make more sense. So once the plugin is out, we will have the following options:

• make an equivalent reserved lot system in the nether or
• make it one huge public area

The next topic is a consequence out of this. Once the nether is active, I can see how much load this will bring on the server, and then most probably give out the outer lots of the map. Then, we will have 30×30 lots up for grabs. Which
Brings us to the next topic:

The Outposts

Currently, the outposts merely serve as travel-points for the people going to others lots or peasants trying to get to their place for the first time. Recently, also the malls were built there. When the outer areas are given out, these will gain in importance. Once the hospitals work, I can also install smaller ones out there etc. The question right now however is about the spawn points. I can theoretically make everybody spawn where their mall is. This has a couple of consequences I want you to think about:

• This would create 9 types of settlers. They can but do not have to be visually different (in chat for example)
• This would give the malls in the outposts more live and therefore more money all
• This would make the game experience different for people since the places look different
• This would give the central spawn a much different role since there are much less lots around spawn and much more new players in the public area etc.
• I would probably switch off the /home command since you then have to walk maximum 500 blocks to your home
• This has a probability of bugs during the transition, since I have to update all the chat channels, user rights etc.
• It’s a piece of work for me too!

I generally intend to do as described above. I think it would be really great and give the server more unique features. If you have opinions on that, specially LOGICAL reasons why this might not work, please tell me. Otherwise I would work on that.

Since I had to go on an urgent trip, and my internet connection is not very good, it might take a couple of days until I can finish the malls.

In the meantime, a little hint: in the finished malls you can take a wooden sword to find out who owns a box. If the box is called box_a1, the owner is the same of lot a1.