It’s there. It’s working. People are building away happily. All exploits we know of are either fixed, or worked around.

The new map is AWESOME.

A couple of things you need to be aware of:

• Shops are there, but disabled, for the moment. They’ll be enabled soon-ish.
• Everyone has lost their permissions. But this is not a bad thing. New ‘default’ users are almost the same as the old + users.. This specifically means you can /region claim areas before you build. This stops a lot of ‘I was building for promotion and I was griefed’ issues. Now, you don’t NEED promotions.
• Donators have lost their D’s. If you’re a D, just /modreq when you’re on the server, and someone will sort you out – it may not happen immediately, but it will happen. There’s nothing we can do about that.
• Also, Donators can now wear hats! Hold a block, and type /hat – you have a hat of whatever you’re wearing.

The bad news is, this weekend, I’m insanely busy with Gladstone Roller Derby‘s bout against Tweed Valley Vixens. So everyone else will be running the fort. This means, if you DO donate, I won’t be able to verify you probably until late sunday afternoon.   You may or may not find me on Twitter, as @xrobau or @GladstoneDerby – so feel free to tweet at me.

We were hoping to move to the new map when we changed to 1.3.1, but I’ve run out of time. So, we’re back to the old map. There are a couple of things broken – Dynmap and Citizens – so it’s not TOTALLY good.

We’ll be messing with the new map over the weekend. No promises as to when it’ll go live though, but we’re trying hard.

Sorry. I realise this is totally unrelated to Minecraft, but, I thought I could only ask. You may know that I’m Gladstone Roller Derby‘s pet geek, and I’ve just been told that we need a flyer for our next Roller Derby bout in August.

I’m hoping I can find someone to volunteer their time to put this flyer together. The bout is called ‘BRAWLESQUE’, and we want the flyer to be somewhat reminiscent of a Burlesque show (can-can legs, ra-ra skirts, that sort of thing).

Anyone interested? Send me an email at xrobau@gmail.com and I’ll forward you what I’ve been given.

I now return you to your previously scheduled Minecraft!

I’ve mentioned this before, and I’ll keep mentioning it to remind people. Linux.conf.au is a massive conference that I go to every year, and a good chuck of the admins and mods are going to be there too. And you’re welcome to come, too!

So. Put this in your calendar now:  28 January to 2 February, 2013

It’s in Canberra (which is easy, if annoyingly canberran, to get to from anywhere), and we’ll have a Minecraft BOF (Birds of a Feather) there where we’ll chat about running a big server, what things we’ve learnt, and what we’re planning on doing.

There will also be pizza, and huge amounts of geeking.

Note that, whilst it’s called Linux.conf.au, it’s not just about Linux. Last year we had (to pick some at random) Arduino talks, How girls can be better represented in IT, computer-controlled model aeroplanes, how pacemakers are closed source, how to make more accessible websites (for the blind) and how to hack your brain. It was awesome. And this year is going to be awesome too.

Normally we _can_ request accommodation to be physically near each other, and I’ll probably bring along our own minecraft server to play with too.   As it gets closer, I’ll post some more announcements here.