I want to give some update on the server, so here we go. The latest release of Minecraft(1.3.1) has revealed a gigantic issue with Minecraft, one that I've been worrying about for a while now. It isn't a bug with the program or a security problem or anything like that. It is an issue with the way Minecraft continues to evolve. People, understandably, get bored with Minecraft after a while. This becomes a problem though when you have plug-in developers that are creating plug-ins that people rely on to run servers. The plug-in community for Minecraft seems to be shrinking, developers are getting bored and moving on. This is leaving a lot of server admins, my self included, in a very bad situation.
I want to update the server to 1.3.1, but can't because a lot of the plug-ins break and even though it has been almost a week since the bukkit update to support 1.3.1 was released, a lot of the developers for popular plug-ins that we use are no where to be found. And this isn't uncommon. Since I started running the server a year and a half ago I've gone through 3 logging programs for anti-griefing. All 3 times the developer has just kind of disappeared. Other plug-ins have just faded away because the original developer disappeared . What is even worse is that a lot of developers never release their source code when they move on, so even if the community wanted to continue developing the plug-in, if another developer wanted to pick the plug-in up and continue work on it, they can't.
What really disappoints me is that a lot of this stuff is things that should be implemented directly in Minecraft, but Mojang is just lazy. Instead they waste time implementing an adventure mode that you can't even access that has no really use. Logging should be a native feature of the Minecraft server, but they'll never add it, so we have to rely on plug-in developers to do it instead. Hell, it took them almost a year just to add native whitelist support to the server side.
So right now updating the server is very frustrating and I have no clue when the server will be running 1.3.1. It it looking like another logging plug-in change, which is time consuming to setup but even more time consuming to learn how to work the plug-in. It also looks like the warp plug-in is dead too, which might mean we have to go through and recreate all the warps... Sometime banging your head on the wall is more productive...