If you want my day-by-day messages on startup look at my server update logs swordsandsheaths.

Well, this would be my first blog post. I go by the name of mini it is not Mini, it is not totent, it's mini. I attempt to keep a 4 GB ram server with over 30 bukkit plugins and a running uptime of 99.5% working well, without changing that last number. I only get online about an hour and a half in a normal day along with a five minute checkup in the morning. Weekends can vary from no time to the whole day working and administering my server.

With that said, it's not easy to upkeep a server on just over an hour a day of work. If you want to, or do run a server I would get your users accustomed to finding out errors and listing them in detail on your forum or PM inbox so you don't waste time figuring out the just of the error. Also make sure you use every bit of time. On the full work days I found myself more and more just chatting or administering when I needed to get things done.

Soft-restarts shouldn't be a problem. If you give your users time to get in a safe position ( a matter of 15 seconds), save, and restart from ingame, there shouldn't be any hassle or problems. If people end up disliking restarts remind them of A. it's fixing things B. You (hopefully) have a crazy uptime percentage, and because of these soft restarts you don't have crashes or rollbacks. Nor do you end up with a crash and the server remaining offline for an extended period of time.

Now onto being an admin:

Upon creating my server I had a crazy (it was truly crazy) idea of making the decision making process democratic. Or at least selectively so. This would be achieved by using your forums to make hidden groups of normal, above normal, trusted, and leader types of groups. This way depending on the issue, people could have a say, and if it was very opinionated, such as a way to create more things to do, you could let anyone feel (and get) like they have a say. This also distributes the pressure from yourself as the head admin if the decision isn't liked when executed. By having a higher group of trusted people, all elected by yourself and elected members before them, you can get a focus-group of players who know what they're doing, but don't make on-the-spot decisions like a staff member (such as a mod) would. But this wasn't just about me, I wanted to try to make it truly democratic so this could benefit the general userbase, since the place I came from didn't allow people to voice opinion on how the server was to go, and sometimes ended up in abuse and scandalous situations. So, the only way to get banned for life was a vote by the inner council along with having to gone through many other rule infractions before that. This has really been able to stop players from becoming discontent with a ban, temp bans give players a feel for how it is without the server while not having the resentment of never coming back. The same goes for the council, I wanted to make sure that I didn't just use the council as a tool of manipulation, so along with them having to vote on all staff position changes, to get someone off the council the whole council, inner, outer, and staff would have to vote them off.

That's my first post.

I'd love to answer questions if you reply or PM me.

The full truth
-mini