Looking for server experience (as in staff experience)

In minecraft servers, I would argue that a claim of staff experience is irrelevent.

When people claim experience, it's typically without any real knowledge of how things work. It's easy to claim "oh, I'm a great moderator", or that you were a great admin, or that you have great people skills. Yet when applying, that's somewhat worthless. It's easy to BS a long history of staffing, and it can be hard to provide actual proof, which allows people to conveniently say "oh, it shut down".

What makes you stand out as an applicant isn't an arbitrary claim of experience. If you have good common sense and know procedures for how to approach problems, you're qualified in the "actual experience" department by the standards of most servers to exist on minecraft. Indeed, many staff, and a concerning number of owners, lack those two bits. What makes you an effective staff member is being able to solve practical issues, which isn't hard if you make the effort to get knowledge first.

A good staff member has experience, yes, but I would say that a good staff member also is able to understand how servers and plugins work. Knowing how coreprotect works, for example, makes you a far better admin when someone has just griefed the server. Knowing how permissions work helps you troubleshoot problems when people are literally unable to do something. Having a great handle on essentials allows you to know /tpo, /tptoggle, /tpa, /tpahere, /who, /seen, and various other commands you might end up using.

There are 'experienced' owners who threw plugins onto a server, launched it, and got a crew of people to hack and slash the features together. If said owner continues for six months and never has more than five people on average, is that really good experience? Would you consider sitting and occasionally exercising your brain on minor hacks and chat issues more valuable than being able to understand how the server you work on works, in addition to being able to solve day to day issues?

My approach with practical staff experience is pretty simple. It's a hard curve between trying to understand things while doing your duties, and simply passing as someone who mutes a couple of people and wipes out an obvious fly hacker. I think your energy is better spent figuring out how plugins and servers function, then trying to get the staff experience portion. Too many owners don't know how servers work. Staff experience is helpful, but only a part of the game.

The most important prerequisite for an owner is the ability to exercise (oft missed) common sense and being able to troubleshoot problems and form your own solutions. If you can do that, as well as have the right kind of persona for recruiting people, then you're already mostly there.

If you're looking to make your own server, you are your own experience. You will be the owner, and anyone under obeys to the rules you set out for them.

What you should avoid is plugins that are not verified by bukkit themselves. Some of these plugins that scammers would send you are named something that you would identify as legitimate but will end up be an exploit to your server.