Move from Cauldron to Forge What Admin tools are needed, How to get there and How can you Help.

[TonyLiberatto 364]

Good point Dries007. Try as much as possible to use Databases instead of Flat Files. They are much faster and it cuts on the Lag.

Prism Dynmap and Towny can be configured for MySQL.

[Dries007 88]

Good point Dries007. Try as much as possible to use Databases instead of Flat Files. They are much faster and it cuts on the Lag.

Prism Dynmap and Towny can be configured for MySQL.

 

It only works with MySQL (its the prism port for forge I was working on a while back)

[TonyLiberatto 364]

My point was about giving preference for the use of Databases instead of Flat files.

I think is important to try and port plugins to Forge, and thank you for that, but at the same time if I have a mod and a plugin that do the same I will always use the plugin. The integration with Essentials and permissions the fact that it does not need client side makes it lighter on the server. 

[Dries007 88]

Well, if you are already using a bukkit system, then by all means. But we didn't want to have to use bukkit just for the logger.

We where of the opinion that a good logger is all that is required to keep players in check, and it has proven true.

Of course we don't run a PVP server, that may require a bit more structure then just being able to ban people when they misbehave.

 

The only thing missing ATM is that inventories are not tracked. As in: you can see that someone was messing with the inventory, but you cannot track exact item movements inside of them.

Since we'd like to make the code generic (aka applicable to vanilla and all mods) that would require some serious work, and we didn't have the time when we wanted to start using the mod.

It ended up not being an issue, because we set the rules to be: don't snoop in other people's chest.

[TonyLiberatto 364]

As long as it works. right? We take all this prevention, but actually we had very little problems with grieffers but who knows, maybe is exactly because people know that we have MCBans and prism. It helps keep the bad away.

To be honest I never had to reload a player base because of grieffing.

And in the more of a year since we started the server never had to ban a player.

I guess most of the people that play TFC are more mature than Vanilla players.

[InsaneJ 561]

Advertising that you have McBans and Prism is by no means an effective measure to prevent griefers on a non-whitelisted public server. We have a few small houses right next to spawn plastered with signs telling players that everything they do is logged and if they grief they get banned. We've banned several dozen people on those 'honey pot' houses alone.

Also inventory tracking is crucial to sort through the issues people create in town politics. There have been more than a few instances where players would take a bunch of items their town has worked on, and then leave that town to join another or start their own. Their (former)town members should have been more careful and not be so trusting. They could have locked their stuff to prevent untrustworthy town members from taking items. But the simple fact is that a lot of players will simply assume that not everybody is a jerk while in reality a lot of players really are jerks in varying degrees.

We've banned over 300 players from our TFC server alone. As you may know we enforce our server rules quite strictly to make sure that the server remains a safe place for players of all ages and walks of life. A lot of those banned players moved on to whitelisted servers (like DarkAgeCraft, hi ). And as long as they follow the rules on other servers that's fine I guess. Point is, we've served over 10.000 individual players. So that means that, as far as we know, about 3% of TFC players are jerks that you really don't want on your server. They will ignore the rules, ignore warnings by players and staff and will try to get away with theft, grief and abusing others. Often times you really have to look hard to find what they did after they've been reported by another player. Having a good and complete lookup tool is often the only way to catch those perps. Blocks, block/item movement, inventories, mob kills, and everything that's entered into the chatbox, basically the whole list of Prism options should be logged (or log-able (is that a word?)) in my opinion.

To be clear. This is concerning a non-whitelisted public server. On our whitelisted servers I think we've banned less than 5 players in the ~4 years we've been running those. We use a community driven election process for access to those servers. In short, VIP members elect new VIP members. It's a slow process but it works for us for the most part.

[Dries007 88]

I would like to have inventory tracking, but its simply impossible to do reliably on a modded server. Forge has no hooks for it, so the only think I can think of is to make some hacky (asm) packet inspector.

The logger we have now is purely forge event based, so it should be compatible with everything.