The End is Near! [1.9 release]

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end-release

We’ve all been hard at work getting the server ready for 1.9, and it’s finally here!

You will be able to enjoy all the two-handed fist-waggling and methodical sword-swinging your heart desires this Saturday Night (9/4/16) at 7PM GMT+10, when we update the server to Minecraft 1.9.2!

As you may have heard, we will not be resetting the Overworld, but we will be resetting the End to take advantage of all the new 1.9 features – and, to celebrate, we’ll be slaying the Ender Dragon as a group!

We’ll need to briefly shut down the server to set everything up first (you can hang out with us on IRC while it’s down); this should only take a few minutes.

So this Saturday night, craft yourself a shield, head to /warp dragonFight, and let’s slay some Ender Dragon! With both hands!

We did a thing! It was awesome!

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Last weekend, I spent 48 hours rebuilding and moving all the backend infrastructure around.  All that happened was a very short outage while we finished moving everything around between instances, but what this MEANS is that now things are faster, better, and more reliable!

If you’re not a nerd, feel free to ignore the rest of this post. However, for the nerds, this is what we’ve done:

  • We now have a multi-master database cluster, with a load balancer and floating IP address to ensure that we have zero database downtime
  • We’ve split out all our worlds into separate instances. This means if a server needs a reboot, we can reboot the entire instance that the world is on, without having any effect on any other worlds!
  • Dedicated t2.medium instance that runs map rendering.  This means we can start rendering the OTHER worlds on maps.mcau.org
  • The ability to easily and automatically create and destroy servers and worlds on demand.
  • Other cool nerdy things (ansible! redis! memcache!)

What this means for you is that things will be faster, better, and more reliable. What this means for US is that we’ll be able to do cooler things, easier, and faster!

vBulletin is dead, long live Discourse.

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For those that haven’t been following the nerd news (and, that’s fine, that’s my job!), vBulletin – our forum software – has been having ongoing security problem after security problem.

I finally bit the bullet today and migrated everything to Discourse. Discourse is about the best forum software you can find at the moment, and it’s amazingly good.

Our forums have stagnated a bit recently, because vBulletin sucked so badly – I hope you enjoy Discourse a bit more!

The only downside is that you’ll need to do a password reset to generate a new password, as It’s impossible to import passwords, so it’ll need to be reset. Sorry!

Introducing ArtMap

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Update: Plugin access is now open to Donors and [1]Users

Since you’ve all been such cool cats, we’ve made a new plugin for you all to enjoy! ArtMap  gives you the ability to paint directly onto a minecraft map using dyes. Currently only Donors and [2]Users will be able to paint, but this will be expanded as soon as we finish beta testing. We will be displaying any particularly awesome artworks that we see at the new /warp gallery.

For information on how to get started, head over to the ArtMap Wiki.

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P.S. If you paint anything naughty, you will have your ArtMap privileges permanently revoked. Staff decide if an artwork is inappropriate, so be sensible.