Well, executive summary is: Bad Things.

At about 8pm last night, MCAU was DDOSed.  Apparently someone thought that we didn’t deserve to be hosted in Australia, and needed to share that feeling around.

This resulted in us being evicted from our Datacenter. I should point out, I hold NO hard feelings here – the guys were great, and I’m really thankful they put up with us for so long.

So we’ve moved the machine to one hosted in the US Temporarily. As the server we WERE running on was about the faster server it’s possible to buy, you can’t rent one of them, so I’ve had to knock the playercount down to 50. Plus the extra 1/2 second block lag means lots of things are getting sucky.

This also means I no longer feel happy with taking anyone’s money to play Minecraft. I’ve cancelled everyone’s subscriptions, and you’ll notice there’s no longer a way to re-subscribe.  I also refunded as many people as I could who had paid in the last few days.

This means that if you were a D before the DDOS, you’ll stay a D. When we figure out what’s going on, I’ll reset everyone’s status, and if you want to remain a D, you can resubscribe then.

If you have any further questions, use the IRC link under Contact Us at the top, and ask there.

Specifically, related to us starting up a new server.  We’re thinking about building a Role Playing (RP) server.

Have a read of this, and tell us what you think. I’d love your feedback.

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.