Coming from the land of Xbox, when I bought PC Minecraft last June (2012), I messed around with Creative mode, quickly got bored, and went to find a good server to play on. I had my mind set on a server that didn't let people grief. The first one I found was some weird pirate-themed server, which I quickly got lost on and promptly left. Eventually, I found a Bukkit server that was completely grief-free, spam-free, mostly troll-free, didn't block anything, and it only ran 3 plugins. Only one of those was anti-grief, and it was Grief Prevention (the other two were Essentials and WorldEdit if you're curious).

Since 1.2.5, I've been on quite a few servers, most of them non-grief. I loved that there were ways to protect your stuff, but almost all of the server owners seemed to design their servers so that either it wasn't possible to completely protect what you make, only chests were protected, the staff had to intervene to protect players' stuff, or worse: the server relied on plugins that responded to grief instead of preventing it in the first place. Most of them had about 4-5 different plugins for anti-grief, each doing something different, whether it was anti-spam, completely blocking TNT, completely blocking lava, or some other experience-hindering addition to Minecraft (not that anti-spam is all that hindering, but blocking items is very hindering--how am I supposed to TNT mine and make cobblestone generators without TNT and lava? >.<).

The funny thing was that these servers were, for the most part, much more laggy than any other servers I'd played on, and the staff had no real idea why. They blamed players owning animals, so they limited that. They blamed redstone, so they limited that. They blamed lava, water, and TNT, so they limited those, if not completely blocking them in an effort to reduce lag and "griefing."

I also wondered why on some servers the staff had to manually protect stuff players build. The staff had to go out of their way to protect someone's stuff with resource-intensive plugins like WorldGuard, and then the player couldn't expand the protection on their own as their home expanded, usually resulting in the player having to hand over absurd amounts of money (usually in-game money) to expand.

The last thing that really baffled me was why, with such a great all-around anti-grief plugin out there, would servers favor using 4-5 anti-grief plugins over using one when performance is what mattered. I'm sorry, but running one plugin that prevents all forms of grief, spam, PvP problems, and advertising is infinitely better than running 4-5 plugins to do the same things any day.

So, I set out to make my own server, where protecting stuff was simple and easy for everyone, OPs and players alike. It's running Grief Prevention as the only anti-grief plugin (aside from CoreProtect, which is used mainly as a convenience and as an anti-cheat plugin), and has yet to be griefed other than the rare case in which for some odd reason a player was incapable of clicking a gold shovel twice to protect their stuff T_T.

Those other anti-grief plugins just didn't cut it for me and any other server owners using Grief Prevention. I've got no problem with people using Towny and Factions for land claiming, but if your server doesn't have a towns or factions theme, why are you using them? They won't suit your needs properly and you're doing it the hard way.

So, what I'm trying to say is: if you're running a no-grief server and you aren't using Grief Prevention, you're doing it the hard way. There's a better, simpler, more efficient, more effective way.