It has been a long road, and a hell of a journey (for them). From the team’s beginning as a measure to control the growing player base, the Moderators have gone through a number of changes to become what they are today.

Or rather, what they were.

Effective immediately, all previous Moderators have been promoted to members of the Administration Team with full privileges and permissions, and the Moderation Team has been permanently dissolved, gone forever.

Furthermore the Administration Team is now known as the Staff Team.

Let’s all welcome the following 6 members to the team!

ThePengwin
nagchampa
NinjaWithAHat
MirranM
trousers_murph
And whatever his name is… (Bearsgoroar)

http://mcau.org/ranks/ For more extra information.

Quick summary: Don’t treat people differently because of their gender. Doing anything else is sexist

There, hopefully we’ve got that straight.   A user has commented on the website (on the ‘Contacting Us’ page, which explicitly says “don’t comment here, your comments will be deleted, use IRC or the Forum”) saying that he was muted for being sexist, and he wasn’t.

Well, actually, yes he was.    Here’s what he said:

girls dont exist on the internet   
actually, girls on games are a myth
girly skins just mean wierd guys
what saying girl gamers are a myth... lol that aint sexist

So here’s the problem. It’s proveably true that girls play games. It’s also proveably true that girls use the internet. This means your statement is proveably false. Ergo. you’re wrong.

So why are you saying it? What point are you trying to make? Are you trying to say that “Gender doesn’t matter online”. Well, yes it does matter. It matters enough that I assume someone is male until they say otherwise (This is wrong, and sexist in itself, but I don’t make a big deal about it). People are people, right? You’re just a person. You may be a nice person, or a nasty person, but you’re just a person. Your gender has nothing to do with it. So yes. Normally, Gender doesn’t matter online. Unless you, or they, want it to matter.

So if we know what you’re trying to say, why were you muted? The answer to that is somewhat more complex. You’re propagating a stereotype. Girls do exist. They have a gender. They may not wish to come out and tell you they’re a girl, but they are. Treating them any differently BECAUSE they’re a girl is not on. Making them feel irrelevant, or even worse, making them think have to pretend to be a guy to get your respect or attention, is totally not on.

Saying that, I’m not perfect. If you’re a girl, and I assume you’re a guy, please don’t get offended. Feel free to correct me (or not, that’s totally up to you), and life will continue on.

Minecraft is a game for people of all ages. Our youngest player is 4 (that I know of – and it’s my son, Blake, or blakeqld in game), and our oldest player is over 60. None of these people care what’s between your legs. They care if you’re nice. They care if you’re honest, and they care that you’re not a griefer. That’s about it.

We’ve always (and this goes back way before we were a minecraft server, back when we were a TF2 server) had hard rules about sexism. IT shall not happen. You don’t treat someone differently because of their gender. You don’t dismiss someone because of their gender. You don’t ignore someone because of their gender. Don’t be sexist. Not hard.

You may be wondering why we take such a hard-line stance toward sexism. Imagine, if you’re a male (and females won’t NEED to imagine this, as they live it every day), being discriminated against every day. Having your body treated as a piece of meat for display. Having your intellect belittled because you happened to be born with the wrong set of chromosomes. Being unable to play the sport you want to play, because its for “Boys Only”. (And don’t get me onto how this new ‘Lingerie Football’ is terrible. The only way females can get people to watch them play is by wearing almost nothing? Geez). I’m a bit over it. All of us are a bit over it. So you may be warned once, but then you’ll be muted or kicked or banned.

The same thing goes with homophobia, too. We don’t tolerate slurs against peoples sexuality, no matter what it may be. But everyone’s pretty good about that these days.

As an aside, if you happen to watch stuff I post on facebook, you’ll see that I’m reasonably involved in the Roller Derby community in Australia. These are girls (and guys) that are involved in one of the most amazing new sports you’ve ever seen. For those that haven’t seen it, it’s been described as “full contact chess on rollerskates”. And that’s pretty much exactly what it is. It’s an amazing game, and is great for women. It’s inclusive, and hard, and fun. And they don’t have to wear almost nothing to get people to come and watch (although, admittedly, a lot of them do wear almost nothing, because it’s a lot more comfortable). This is what sports should be. They are inclusive: If you identify and live as a female, you can skate in a girls team. If you’re straight, gay, or bi, you can skate. If you’re black, white, or covered in bruises (which is surprisingly common after a bout), you can skate. If you’re a guy, you can skate (in a mens team, or as a ref). If you can’t skate, you can act as an off-skate official. If you can’t officiate, you can be an announcer. If you can’t announce, then you can hang around and watch the game and help out. If you can’t hang around and watch the game, then you don’t know what fun is.

That’s inclusivity. And that’s what we try to achieve here. No differences. No priority. No player is better than any other player, except as determined by their skill. Not by their gender, or who they love.

Sorry for this essay, but I didn’t want to simply dismiss this players concern as ‘yes, you were sexist’ without explaining to him HOW he was being sexist. Hopefully this has clarified our position.

Those of you playing today might be confused why our Survival world wasn’t available for a few hours. So here’s what happened:

Here at MCAU we want to make sure we don’t lose our world data for any reason. So we make backups. Turns out we had made enough backups to fill up the server’s hard drive completely, and that’s what happened last night. The server started crashing because there was no room to save the world any more, so we deleted some older backups to make room.

Unfortunately, during the time when the server was trying to save with no space, it started saving some chunks over the top of other ones, corrupting the world. The server kept crashing because of the corruption, so today we tried to fix it.

This didn’t work so well the first time because the backup I tried to use was the one that the server was trying to make when it ran out of space. So most of that backup never got saved… There were a lot of upset people who found their houses were gone! Luckily we make backups every 2 hours, so I have now used the next-earlier one from about 8pm last night, which wasn’t affected.

In addition to this I’ve “rolled forward” the server from that point onwards, using our LogBlock system. The same way we can roll back griefing, we can roll forward from our backups, so no progress should have been lost.

Sorry for all the inconvenience, and I’m going to make sure this doesn’t happen again: Next time the server starts running out of space it’s going to automatically send a few emails out to make sure we know about it and can make some room before things get messy.

P.S. Unfortunately some people’s /home settings were lost, they weren’t backed up with the world. Not much way we can get those back, sorry.

Thanks for your patience, and thank you for flying MCAU!

Today I’ve finished moving everything from Amazon’s Singapore cloud to their Sydney cloud. We’ve still got the same DDOS protection as we’ve previously had, but it’s now a lot closer to home. You’ll notice the change mainly because the latency has dropped significantly (by about 50msec) Yay!

Greetings players! With the events of the 7th Star now a distant memory, 1.5 is Out and ready to go!

Enjoy the splendors of a new rich world, as you sail the MCAU seas in search of treasures and wondersDelve headlong into PVP, and fight tooth and nail against your enemies, or create a faction and rule supreme over all others

Or retreat to the MCAU Space Station 01 where you can catch a portal to another world, a spaceship to another universe, or Zgraxxis fever at a local drinking hole.

The choices are yours!

This footage was found on the body of a permabanned griefer, and since we do not know its age, our 24 hours may already be up.

Transcription:
———-
This is the 7th Star, Saviours of the digital world.
For too long we have watched this world shift and change to the admins demands
World after world after world, progress destroyed, chaos washed away
We have deemed this world, our world, and have taken control of it away from those who would control you.
———-
This world will be saved, and its walls broken down!
Fire will fill the streets!
Explosions will echo in the distance!
We will lead you into a new reign of chaos and and liberty!
———-
In 24 hours this world will be ours.
We are many.
We are freedom.
Expect us.
———-

Top 2:
Strangely_brown
Spazhead

Next 6:
thinker_9
Austindb9
lgibbo
michaelnerf
freaky_zekey
kevlar_miner

As some of you may know, three of the four current header images are as old as September of 2011… (Those are the images at the top of this page with the big ‘MINECRAFT.au!’ over the top of it).

So in saying that, us here at MCAU Headquarters thought it would be a marvelous idea if we let the players take their own images and submit them to us for ranking. We will undertake thorough inspection of each image submitted to make sure it is of absolute quality.

At the end, we will choose between eight (Yes, eight!) overall winners, and two major winners. The two major winners shall both receive:
• One month of donor-ship.
And overall the eight winners will:
• Get a sneak preview of next map's spawn.
• Be in a lovely group photo by themselves in front of said new spawn.
• Be in a magnificent group photo with MCAU Staff members!

“Yeah, that’s nice and all, but how do we enter!?” You say? Well, by following the steps below, you will be in the running for these amazing prizes!

1. Take a screenshot of something AWESOME, from ANYWHERE on our server, using the default texture pack! (Press F1 to hide your HUD, and then press F2 to take a screenshot.)
2. Make a copy of that screenshot and crop it to 1000px in width and 288px in height. (Failing to crop the image means we will not accept it, or we will crop it ourselves randomly and will not look as you intended.) (If you don't know how to get to your screenshot folder; Click Here.)
3. Create a new e-mail with the subject: Website Header Image: <Your Name Here>
4. Add the recipient of the e-mail as: admin@mcau.org
5. Add your new image as an attachment to that e-mail.
6. In the body of the email, type where you took the screenshot, and your username again. (Include the co-ordinates, they can be found by pressing F3 in-game.)
7. Check the above details and click SEND.

Assuming you did all the above step correctly; you’re now in the running to win the smashing prizes!

Notes:
You must use the default texture pack when taking your image.
You can submit multiple ones, but we will only use the best one you submitted.
The place you image does not have to be your own.

STATUS: Submissions are closed.

As you may have heard, some parts of Queensland are a bit damp. Sadly, I live in Gladstone, one of the EXTREMELY damp places, and my house has been flooded. Luckily  I’m in Noosa at the moment, after volunteering at a Roller Derby bout down here on Australia day, but I won’t be able to get home for a couple of days.

I’ll be waffling on facebook, for anyone that cares. But this does mean that D’s will be sporadically processed.