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How to avoid server grief
This blog is mainly for all the people who are new to server development. I have only been a server developer for a short time, around 5 or so months and in this time I have been witness to quiet a bit of grief to my server. The hardest thing about people griefing your server is explaining to the players and compensating them for anything that may have been destroyed. Alot of players spend hour's trying to find materials and resources to create something that is just right for them so you can understand why people are so devastated when something that they may have spent hours or days worth of time and effort gets destroyed.
In this small blog I am going to cover a few things such as players, plugins roll backs.
Lets get this thing started.
Pesky PMC players
One of the most common types of grief attempts you will come across is that pesky player that will log onto your server and say something like "Hi my name is Griefer_noob (Their Ign name) and im from PMC, I have come to review your server" or something along those lines. Keep in mind that if anyone from Planet Minecraft really did join your server they would not be asking for special permissions that other players didn't have.
They will some times start out with small requests, Asking for fly mode or god mode and getting to you waste your time showing them around. A lot of the time they have no intention of staying on your server at all, The only thing they want is to butter you up earn a bit of false trust and get you to give them access to your Admin / Operator controls and commands.
The people at PMC are professional and in saying that they try to keep their name clean and professional. If people from PMC started scamming servers do you think their website would be so successful?
Players with OP can completely destroy your server. You should not think lightly about who you give access to operator. There is little difference between what an admin and a operator can do also, they pretty much have access to everything the other can do. I suggest if you are going to make someone on your server an admin or an operator that it is someone you have known for quite some time and have ALOT of trust in. I personally have had a server for around 5 months like a said earlier and still do not have anyone in the admin position.
In my opinion (opinions may vary) an operator is someone who should have a lot of previous experiance and should be able to....
o Read and understand YAML (plug in language)
o Be able to assist with the technical side of things such as in game command errors
o Someone who you can communicate with and contact any time you have trouble
Things that you should not consider in applications of admins
Players who say they know how to
o Use all the commands
o Know how to world edit
Especially don't accept people who just joined your server and are already talking about helping by using console commands.
These are things I believe are simply just not important to a server admin and if you have found a good admin that can do the things posted above then there is a very high chance they will know how to do those other things anyway's. If a player trying to get admin by saying they know the all the commands there is a good chance they are either trying to use the commands for a advantage over the players or they are wanting to grief your server.
Plugins
There are many great plug ins available to help you detect and roll back grief. Today I will be covering a couple that are available to Bukkit users.
The ones I will be talking to you about in this blog are plugins that I have personally used so that I can go more into depth about it and I can speak from experiance.
World Guard.
This plug in that I find is a must and really an essential to your server and plug in list is World Guard, With world guard you can do alot of amazing thing to protect land and creations.
Some feature include Owner and member protection. With this feature you can protect a certain area from EVERYONE on the server except for the players you initially give access to. Once you have set up an area for protection you there are alot of flags you can set to stop mostly any grief from being made possible in that area. Once enabled these flags can do things like stopping any spread of water and lava or disabling fire, You can stop TNT from causing damage to the world and players or even creeper explosions or even disable mob spawning all together so if a griefer does manage to get ahold of a creeper egg it can not spawn in the area of protection anyway. There is alot made possible by this plugin in ways of helping keep your creations and server safe from griefers.
Logblock
This is a kinda new one for me and a little tricky at first to get used to but no I have it im left wondering what I have done without it all this time.
Basically with this nifty little plug in you can log almost every action that happens on the server by every player including your staff and when you find any grief you can just right click or fill the hole with a tool block and it will tell you who has placed a block or destroyed. Easy as that!
You might be happy with knowing who has caused grief on the server but that's not where it ends.
You can also use in game commands to roll back anything that has been destroyed by a player using parameters like Player, Time, Area, Selection with the World edit tool(another useful plugin), This plugin will save you ALOT of time and effort also you wont have to worry about have to go find a back up and rolling back the whole server to a previous time. This is another plugin I would call an essential.
LWC
This is another simple addon. It helps with raiding of chests and bases more then helping for actual grief so im just going to keep this really short.
With this plugin any chest or sign that gets created will automatically lock to the player who placed it. After it is place only the player who created it will be able to break or open it.
Also with this plugin you can put password protection on doors and chests to allow Minecraft friends to have access.
Keeping safe from staff
Staff are supposed to be the people on your server you can trust but sometimes that's not the case either. You may have had a falling out with them (some kinda argument) or maybe they are just bored and experimenting. Sometimes experimenting with commands can be very bad for your server especially if you are not online to clean up the problem fast. So to finish off this blog I am going to leave a small guideline for you to follow if you choose if not that is fine too I am just happy you have managed to make it this far in my blog.
Builders - Alot of servers have positions available for players who are exceptional builders and like to help out with building structures for the server. This people usually have access to a plugin called world edit. WE or World Edit can be VERY dangerous for your server in the wrong hands. You can turn around for 15 seconds then look back your screen and there will be a Massive void in the ground or millions of blocks just vanished into thin air from the bedrock to the sky, Provided your server can handle the edit if not it will just crash you will see it when you come back. Or change an entire mountain in a stack of TNT which will explode and cause tnt to get spread for miles. Some precautions to take to avoid this from happening is to very carefully choose what permissions your builder has access to. You can usually find a list of every permission on the bukkit dev page (bukkit users) where you downloaded the plugin or where ever you got it from.
Moderators - A moderator should be a friendly player that is very active on the server and well know with the players within it that also has a good reputation. In my opinion this is a very simple position that really shouldn't be made much different then a regular player. Your moderators should be able to take care of traffic on the server and keep out all the nasty's. Players who constantly spam the server, People who hack, Attempted grief ect. They should not have access to the game mode command, This will only cause them to use it to get a advantage over players or cause item spam on the server which in turn may cause lag. The main permissions that a moderator should have (remembering this in my opinion again) Are ability to Mute / Jail / Kick and depending on how much you trust your staff the ability to ban.
Admins - This is the top of the ladder no one other then the owner come after this so it is important to make sure the user is TRUSTED. As stated above this position should not be given out to just anyone and really should not even be considered as a position to anyone unless they have previous server development. The admin can do just about anything you the Owner / Operator can do so giving it out without a second thought could end up very very bad for your server and the players who play on it. When I say previous experience I do not mean that they know how to use commands like /gamemode /fly /warp and so on. Be very careful when choosing an admin for the server.
Well that just about wraps it up for this blog. I wish everyone who has read to here the very best in your server development adventures. Thanks so much for reading and if you enjoyed the log or it helped you in anyway please leave a diamond and comment.
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