Placed cake inside claims is not protected. Thought I would let you know! One of my players was saving a cake from his birthday and it got eaten by another player today.

Plugin is failing, when ppl's names are _hey_ or any starting and ending at underscore. Syntax error in log.

4.8.1 Fixes!

• Endermen will not pick up blocks.

• Creatures will not trample soil.

• If a player uses a piston to push a block into or out of a claim, it won't work.

• Minecarts and boats are now protected in claimed areas, as they were previously.

@snarf004

Hey I'm about to release an update, but I wanted to respond to you explicitly so you could see that I did explore all of your issues, even though that might not be obvious based on the changelogs. :) Thanks again for your testing! Several bugs are now fixed that would have hung around if not for your report. If you go for another round, please avoid running any plugins that change the default game mechanics in a meaningful way, like the magic spells plugin.

3. Fire charges directly placed: success. They set everything on fire. The fire killed NPC's and animals but did not burn buildings or crops.

I was unable to reproduce this. What do you mean by "set fire charges directly"? When I right click with a charge in hand, it doesn't place any fire. When I punch something with it, nothing special happens. Maybe this is one of your other plugins changing the way fire charges work?

4. Arrows fired into the claim by a dispenser: success. NPC's and animals were killed.

I was unable to reproduce this. Was your claim an admin claim? Those allow for killing animals. Only private claims protect animals. I spent almost two hours on this, trying very hard to get a dispenser placed just right to arc an arrow over a fence. When I finally succeeded, the arrows just bounced off the chickens. Fire charges don't seem to drift much, so after 10 minutes of trying, I finally just removed the fence (real players fence their flock, unlike NPCs) and moved the dispenser level with the chickens. Again, no damage to the chickens, and I was also unable to catch anything on fire with the charges inside the claim (I pointed them at leaves and logs). Again, your fire problem might be due to another plugin making charges do something different than what they do in Vanilla.

5. Snowmen released near the area: success. snow trails.

I don't think I can fix this because it's impossible to know who a snowman belongs to, and I don't care to. It's a very minor annoyance at best. Plus, the snowmen have to be built outside the claim, and they can't be lead, so you have to either hope they will wander like you want, or build a contraption to funnel them. That's a lot of effort just to get some snow on the ground.

6. Rail cars can be broken. Rail lines cannot.

I fixed this, thanks! There was a change in Bukkit I was unaware of. It was also possible to damage someone else's boat.

7. Pistons will extend one block into a claim, and can push items that far. 8. Pistons which push ice into a claim and near a glowstone will generate waterfalls. 9. A series of pistons pushing gravel or sand into the claim, repeatedly, will create a wall inside the claim.

I was allowing this on purpose because the griefers were basically giving their blocks away, but I hadn't thought of melting a block of ice this way. I think it's not a huge deal because getting silk touch and for the ice is a pain. However the water could break torches and redstone gadgets, so I've fixed this. Unfortunately, the fix is expensive in the case of a player rigging some redstone contraption to constantly try to push and pull blocks around claimed areas. So I've added a fun solution for that - if you try to change the ownership of a block with a piston, the piston will break - there's an explosion, and the piston drops as an item.

13 Chicken eggs which are spammed nonstop into the claim will spawn chickens, which revert to claim ownership. This means that chickens can trample crops which non-owners cannot.

At first I was thinking this was a reverse grief... because the griefer would be replacing crops with chickens, which are more rare and valuable. And crops are so easy to replace. But then I realized that all it really takes is one chicken, and even without eggs, a griefer might opportunistically lead any monster or animal (with wheat) to trample crops. So I've fixed this. I've also fixed endermen picking up blocks because they're a nuisance, even though they can't be lead for targetted griefing.

@TehTheve

No.

@Fishrock123

All logging-based solutions are inferior to GP because they are reactive, whereas GP is proactive. Logging solutions let griefers do damage, and requires admins to come along and "undo" it. So players get sadface, then have to wait for (who knows how long) until an admin comes to undo the damage. Grief Prevention actually prevents griefers from doing any damage, so a single admin can run a very large server, and players get to enjoy the game without interruption. It also doesn't require a database. It also covers chat grief (spam), and PvP grief (spawn camping) in addition to world-based grief. I'm sure there's much more I could say, but this is already a paragraph of all the reasons a logging plugin should be, at best, a backup plan behind a preventative plugin like mine.

I'm fine with constructive criticism, even of the harsh sort. But your offhanded snarkery is not welcome, and if you do it again, you'll be banned from commenting here.

@snarf004

Thanks very much Snarf, I'll look into each of these one by one and close any gaps. I see that many of those are opportunistic or require a lot of patience and resources, so that's good. Nonetheless, I will eliminate them.

About the plugins, that's the problem of an admin. I can't possibly stop other plugins from adding new routes for grief, so admins have to think carefully before adding something like magic spells, which GP can't be expected to know about.

Yes, I will agree that given permission, motivated with money, and provided with in-game resources (or enough time to gather them), a group of smart kids working together can find a way to grief a build which was generated by Mojang rather than built by a player. If real server owners actually ran their servers that way, then I'd tell them to stop shooting themselves in the foot. While I appreciate your bug report and will close most of those gaps, I think your test scenario was extreme and unrealistic, so basing any judgement call on it is going a little far, in my opinion. :)

@ryvix

Sure, I can fix minecarts and probably cakes. I think the minecart problem is a new thing - I had protected them previously. Must have busted it somewhere along the way.

I'll get your code update out in the next version, I forgot again this time.

Hi there,

I don't know if I have many customizations left which you haven't added to the plugin now but you haven't updated your source this time so I can't send you money =)

Also they are complaining about people stealing their minecarts and cake. It seems they are able to eat the cake and break the minecarts and steal those. I don't know if there is something you can do about that even, or if you did anything about that in the latest version.

Thanks for all your hard work!

4.8 Updates!

• Dispensers can no longer be used to spawn creatures in the wilderness in creative rules worlds. If you're running an earlier version, a griefer could create a temporary problem using this exploit (temporary because the automatic cleanup would delete all those entities later). I was going to give props to the griefer who found this, but I forgot his name. :) On my creative server, he motivated players to evacuate a smallish area by filling it with hundreds of clucking chickens.

• Players who ask how to "protect" their stuff will now get a link to the basics video.

• Saplings planted in subdivisions were disappearing instead of growing. That's fixed.

• The "claim investigation tool" (default stick) is now customizable. I recommend against customizing it unless you have a strong reason to do so (like conflict with another plugin), because all of the videos tell players to use the stick, which will lead to some confusion with your players.

• Creative mode players will no longer be bothered with the "pvp immunity" notification messages.

• Updated the anti spam to make it more strict on IP addresses, and more lenient for similar consecutive messages. Also, no single-character chat will be sent.

• The "player placed a sign" log entries have been compressed into a single entry instead of two.

@vein_mx

Is it maybe a subdivision? There's a bug right now that saplings in subdivisions disappear instead of growing. I have it fixed already, just testing it now and plan to release that fix alter today.

@Rustynunu

You'll be placed outside his claim, on the surface. There is a small opportunity to abuse this mechanic, and I don't want to get into the details. :) If somebody figures it out and starts using it, I can update the code to avoid that workaround, at a small cost to performance.

As an admin, use the /give command or better yet, put yourself in creative mode.  For players, you need to make one (you only need to find one piece of gold ore).  Remember that brand new players get a free land claim when they place a chest, so they're not vulnerable to griefers while they look for their first piece of gold.

@squeezer2k

I'm not doing anything with SQL, and I'm not placing signs myself (I'm just logging their text to the log file). It must be another plugin trying to write to a database and failing. Although it's risky to disable your anti grief even briefly, the quickest way to confirm that it's not GP is to disable GP for a few minutes, and build that same sign (with the same text) again. Here I'm assuming the sign was placed manually by a player. If it was placed by a plugin, it might also be the case that the plugin is somehow creating a sign with abnormally long text, which is causing a problem with your database logging plugin.

EDIT: Looking more closely, your logs indicate that it's CoreProtect which is trying to write to the database.

Is that build you're using a dev build? If it is, that's very likely the root problem. Those builds can be full of Bukkit bugs, which cause all manner of mayhem with plugins.

@Tigergruppe

It might just be the overall load on your server. After all, you're running four different protection plugins at the same time. Is WorldGuard available to your players, or just admins? That can make a big difference in cost to run it. I don't know of any way to determine exactly what your server is doing when it goes quiet, sorry. :\

Also double-check the recommendations on bukkit wiki for number of players per MB of RAM. I'd expect that if you're right on the edge, running several protection plugins simultaneously would push you over.

In case it helps, I'll give you my server info for comparison. I'm running 1GB of RAM with 20 player slots. I have 1200 grief prevention claims (built up over 6 months). I've never, ever had a lag problem or crash problem, except for the few times I tried to run Orebfuscator. Today I also run NoCheatPlus, AntiXRay, PopulationDensity, and SimplyVanish. My hosting provider is BeastNode. I pay 20 bucks per month.