We’ve changed the mumble server – if you have suddenly found that you can’t connect to mumble it’s because your trying to connect to the wrong machine.  You should be connecting to ‘mumble.mcau.org’ (or epic.mcau.org, for backwards compatibility).

If you’re not connecting to that, your mumble won’t work.

Right now our economy is pretty broken and there isn’t a great way to earn money due to exploitation/overusing the past setup. People were just selling one item that had the highest sell price that was easily obtainable/farmable. So we need to change something that is sustainable and lets people earn money without people making HUGE pumpkin farms.

Awesome. So am I. Which is why you can now get directly to the forums by typing in ‘forum.mcau.org‘ or ‘forums.mcau.org‘ into your address bar, rather than http://mcau.org/forum

That’s it. Easy!

Someone just invited you to join their server to .. test something? Or, see a cool new thing? Or, whatever?

It’s a trap. Don’t do it. There’s a known security issue with Minecraft where the act of you joining a compromised server will let the hacker who’s running the compromised server join ANOTHER server as you.

It happened to a couple of people today. They lost a pile of money and items. Luckily enough, the people who were the recipients of the stolen stuff have been quite nice about it, and have returned pretty much everything. But don’t expect that to happen all the time. The best idea is to only join well known servers for the moment.

The bug will be fixed in the next release of minecraft, but as that’s a couple of weeks away, you’ll have to be on your guard for the moment.

We’re pretty laid back here. But trying to chat up an 11 year old girl? Not cool. Seriously not cool. Remember people, people play here of ANY AGE. My son (minecraft account ‘blakeqld’) is 3 and he gets on and wanders around and has fun. And Jade, my 6 year old daughter (‘jadet’) is on here too.

Now we’ve banned the user responsible, because it’s possible that he was just joking around. But this is no joking matter. There are some things you don’t joke about, and this is one of them.

Anyway. Onto the other news (that’s not worth making another post about) – The Forum now has coloured names to match your in-game status, if you’re a Donator. There’s no reason why I can’t expand it to get everyones groups, just lazyness on my behalf. So sign up with the forum, using your minecraft username as your account name.

If you’ve already signed up to the forum and you didn’t, click on ‘Settings’ up the top, and then ‘Edit Profile’ under ‘My Settings’ on the left. (Or you should just be able to click on this link to take you straight there). Fill in your minecraft name, and then get a mod to change your group (you won’t be auto-promoted, because there’ no way to stop multiple people from claiming the same name there).

If someone steals your name to use as an account, simply /modreq in game, and the account will be handed over to you. Easy!

How about you be nice to me?

We have, once again, exceeded our 1TB of data/month, and I’d really like it if more people subscribed!  It doesn’t cost much (C’mon, $5 month is like 1 cup of coffee!) and every bit helps.   For those that are curious, the server costs about $1000/month to host.

I’ll just wait for all of you to get back up off the floor.

Yes, it is that expensive. We need a lot of low-latency, Australian hosted bandwidth.  And then we need lots of power and air-conditioning to keep the servers happy. All this adds up, and yes, it is expensive. So, please – if you enjoy MCAU, and you think we need a bit of support, go read the Donators page, see all the cool things you get, fill in your minecraft username, and click ‘Subscribe’.

I’ve tried hard to let people talk freely, and discuss posts without needing to log in. This has normally worked pretty well, but, sadly, that’s going to have to change. Due to someone deciding to spam one of the posts with abuse, I’m going to have to now require people to log in before they can comment.

I really didn’t want to do it, but that’s the only way I’m going to be able to easily do it.  I will have a look around and see if I can get Google or Facebook authentication happening, so – hopefully – it won’t be too onerous.

I apologise for the inconvenience, but, once someone’s decided to be an idiot, there’s not really much I can do about it.

Edit 30 minutes later: Right! Derpbook connect is now linked into the blog, too. If you have a Facebook account, you can just click ‘Log In’ and it should automatically associate your Facebook profile with an account here, and you can comment away. It’s two extra clicks, but, it’s not a new username and password you need to remember.

Of course, if this isn’t working, then, it’s going to be hard to comment here to say it’s not working. Maybe you should use the ‘Talk to us on IRC’ link on the right hand side of the main page. However, I tested it, and it worked for me. That’s about all I can try

Edit later on: He jumped on IRC and tried to defend himself and apologise. I’ve deleted most of his posts here, but they were all pretty much along the lines of ‘YOU SUCK’ etcetera. Here’s the transcript of his whinging on IRC. Warning: Slight swearing towards the end. But very funny.

Yes. You can can haz forum.

After umming and aahing over this for a while, I finally decided that we DID need a forum. So that’s what we have. It’s the first link on the menu bar along the top, or, you can go to http://mcau.org/forum if you’re the kinda person who likes to remember URLs.

It’s linked in with Facebook, so you can just register with your Facebook account. Don’t forget to update your profile with your Minecraft account name, so we know who you are.

Enjoy!

After his previous attempt, he sat himself down, and put some more work into it.

This time, we were all impressed. We could hear the singing and the music, there was a good amount of effort put in, and we can see that he’s hopefully not going to be a pain any more.

So, yes, he’s now unbanned! Congrats, and lets hope you don’t need to be banned again.

UPDATED:  Minecraft.net is failing about 95% of the authentication requests. I’ve started up a temporary, vanilla, server. There’s no permissions, as Authentication is Disabled. So. Don’t trust anyone unless you see it coming from the console. Sorry.

Yeah. We know. It’s nothing to do with us, the Minecraft.net authentication servers are playing up, and taking a LONG time to validate logons. If they totally die, we’ll do our normal  thing of firing up a temp map and disabling server authentication.

I’ll update this post when the errors stop.