Reminder: Illegal Mods (Also, Regarding Today's Downtime)

Hi guys!

So, we got a lot of reports regarding the server being totally screwy and crashing every five minutes this evening, perhaps for several hours. This essentially resulted in the server being unplayable, which was a pain in the neck for everyone. We appear to have fixed the problem, but we felt you guys deserved an explanation for the whole mess. So, we decided this announcement was in order. I'll be direct for those without much time. The important bits are in bold and/or underlined for ease of reading.

The cause of our server being down for several hours this evening was directly linked to illegal mod use.

In order to solve this issue, we decided to check the server logs. A peculiar thing we started to notice was that, just before every single crash, someone had attempted to load a popular hub world. (The Wolves' Den, for the curious, but that's not to say that those in charge of the world are at fault. No lynch mobs, please.) In addition, we had multiple reports of corrupt blocks causing fatal errors, which also caused server issues. After restoring the world to a previous state (before the crashes), we've yet to have any more server instability, so the conclusion is pretty obvious.

From the looks of it, someone put down some non-vanilla assets (blocks of some kind) onto the Wolves' Den, which caused the world to crash. This essentially corrupted the planet, and crashed the server whenever it was loaded.

If you guys were ever curious as to why we're kind of strict about what mods you can and cannot use, well, this is why. Not only can they crash individual players, but certain mods can even cause instability for the entire server as a whole. See also, the aforementioned several hours of downtime. It's unlikely that whoever put down the corrupt assets even knew that it would do that (though they might have), but the result was the same. Multiplayer-unfriendly mods are also known to cause serious lag, which we've also had problems with as of late.

We felt you guys deserved to know this, so this announcement was in order. In the same way, we also think you guys deserve to know the following:

Because of increasing issues with this, we will be cracking down on disallowed mod use in the very near future. Our logs let us know who logs in with them, and we will most likely be talking to the frequent users of these mods within a week. If those we talk to refuse to work with us on it, we may have to issue temporary bans.

I will personally say that I honestly hate banning anyone, even for a short period of time. But we've got an entire playerbase, here, and if we have to temporarily ban someone for the sake of everyone else, we will do so. That's always been our stance.

We're letting you guys know this both as a courtesy, as a sign of respect, and as a forewarning. If you're using unapproved mods, we urge you to uninstall them before we have to talk to you about it. We'd like to have as little conflict in this community as we can. You guys hate it, we hate it, and it's more work for us anyway. We're going to be actively working to solve these issues and prevent further ones within the next week at most. If you're using illegal mods and were unaware they were a problem... Seriously, we understand. A lot of people forget why we have that rule in the first place. Just please uninstall them as soon as possible, now that you're aware, so that we don't have to send you a warning for it or do anything else.

If you have any questions, feel free to post them here or PM us privately. Thanks for your time, and your patience with our recent instability.

Hopefully, we'll stop having it in the near future.

 

Preeecisely. The problem is that when a bunch of people log in at once, you can get false positives. So we don't ban EVERYONE that comes up, or we'd be banning... Um. Me. Because I know I came up once or twice. So did you at one point, humourously enough.

But we can generally tell when someone is actually using a mod or not. When I said "frequent users", what I actually should have said was "users". As in, people actually using the mods.

I apologize for the confusion.

 

Indeed. As Khaltor said, many of those items are made with vanilla assets being manipulated in creative ways. Which are safe.

It's a tricky distinction, but yours are fine. I have one, too.