I have also taken away most of the plugins on my server, which I actually prefer (pure survival) and made a more friendly environment at the spawn where anyone can build. I might be buying professional hosting soon (fingers crossed) in which case I can take down the white-list.
Hope there are some people out there that would like to get involved :)
Thanks,
BlueRama

Additional Notes

This is a Minecraft server I created a few days ago, but until recently have been tackling issues such as lag and griefing. I have decided to make it white-list because of this.