What happened with the server today?!

Wow, been some time since I last used the website for an update but this is too much for chat.

Yesterday, May 26th, a group of hack client kiddies came onto the server, talking about how cool they were with their hack skills (downloading a hacked client and clicking a button is not hacking but I digress). So, after about 8 of them logged on I decided to download the client, see what it could do and try to prevent anything nasty from happening. I found a plugin called Horizon. I ran some tests with the puckman71 account and Horizon indeed seemed to block most of the bad behavior, some like radar it did not but they are not that bad. Problem solved I thought.

Fast forward to the next day. Some unknown error slowed down the server which resulted in some false positives on fast movements. To make matters worse some staff logged on and of course, they can do things normal players cant which resulted in even more false positives which kicked people off plus grew the usual 10kb log file to a massive 4000kb log file which REALLY slowed down things.

Mammoth and crew reported a few other plugins possibly causing some slowdown which I’m currently investigating. It was also brought to my attention that saving the map every 15 minutes was too much. I did this as the first 1.14 release was buggy and often crashed the server. When the server crashes you lose whatever edits you did since the last save. Seeing things are more stable I have changed it to 1 hour. That means if it crashes you will have lost 1 hour of building.

We also moved from Spigot to Paper, many rave about its performance, we switched about a week ago and so far it’s looking solid.

I’m tweaking the server daily for better performance. If something seems off please contact me on Discord. Screaming in chat helps no one. See a problem, report a problem, analyze it and resolve it. The kaizen way!