Okay scratch that, It's up now. Anyway, there's not much security other than a whitelist. On it atm, I have:

Thalonkoju
Zarar
evilscaught
Zapadory
Syckosnow
Desfang
MXplosive1
AxeMen60
Awesomness47
bluearctica

Please tell me if I missed anyone, or if I misspelled a name.
It may be a while before I get a backup plugin and a password plugin, seeing as there are like, none that are updated. And since I don't want to create the new world until then, and since I don't have the old world anymore, we're kind of stuck in a limbo so to speak. Nothing we do in the current world will be saved, because we'll be going to a new world shortly.

Making progress

So I found a new HDD for my laptop, installed and configured the Ubuntu server, and now I'm working on setting Vittescape up. The server is not good to go yet, so if you try to join, it won't let you. It will tell you that you're not on the white-list. I'm going to try using a white-list, and see how that goes. I think it should work just fine. I don't expect the server to be up today or tomorrow, but we'll see.

Well My HDD seems to have broken. o.O. it makes a weird sound when it runs, and I suspect that the disc is a bit loose or something. So, until I can get that resolved, Vittescape will probably be down. :( Sorry, there's not much I can do in the meantime.

The next step

It would seem as though everybody has agreed with my proposal. So, sometime in the near future, I intend to zip up the current world into an archive, and start a new world from scratch. However, I don't know what this new world will be. In order to move forward with this plan, we need something which we clearly lack: Organization. It's not difficult to achieve, it's just a bit annoying when not everyone can skype. So, as a replacement, I request that everybody who regularly joins be online as much as possible for the rest of the week. Hopefully, we'll be able to all be on at once, so we can discuss the future of Vittescape. I'm not going to do anything until we can all come to a unanimous decision as to how the new city will shape up. So, if you have any suggestions, please don't hesitate to post in the chat. Just, please be sure that your sentences are formed correctly, and that your thoughts are clear. I don't want a bunch of spam. Coherent ideas are always welcomed, and are in fact, needed if we are going to do this right. Thank you all for the support, and I hope to hear from each and every one of you. I'd like to get at least some basic parameters laid out before school starts in about a week.

A Simple Proposal

     My comrades, an epiphany has dawned on me. Arkshire is empty. Heliopolis has too much extra space. Everybody wants to start a new town. What are the reasons for this? I asked Awesomness47 of his motives, and he stated that he wants people to visit him. People like Awes are poor, and struggle to make money, not because the established monetary system is obsolete, or broken; but because he has no business. There is no business not because there is no demand, but because he is unreachable. As it stands, Vittescape is divided. The population is spread thin, across miles of terrain. This situation is the cause for things like half empty cities, and low populations. We think that building bigger and better monuments in our cities will affect the influx of citizens, and in turn, the quality of the city; but that method is a means to an end. Making a city bigger only exacerbates the problem! What we need is unification. What we need is ONE city. What we need is a new beginning. I believe that to end the struggles in Vittescape, we need to start over. We shouldn't need to worry about having to bribe a new player to go to one city or another. Frankly, such behaviour creates a stressful situation for the player, creating subconscious tension, potentially hindering his/her bond to Vittescape. We need to unify the world, under one name. We must destroy the establishments of old Vittescape, and start fresh, with a new city. It is my belief that if we work together, in unity, we'll be more organized, we'll accomplish more, and we'll be more welcoming to new players.
     However, something like this does not happen over night. These are the workings of a revolution (peaceful, though it may be). I am proposing something drastic - The systematic collapse of all current cities in Vittescape in exchange for the establishment of a newer, bolder city. One that was made by the collective efforts of all who inhabit Vittescape. Initially, many may find themselves opposed to this plan. Many may find themselves wondering "what might become of my creations? and of my dedication to my old city?". I know it is not easy to give up something that you have worked so long and hard on. But know that if we all work together, our combined efforts put towards a new community will far surpass any limits that you may have previously reached. If we are closer to each-other, it will be less troublesome to share resources.
     I don't have any doubts that the road ahead will be long, tedious, and tiresome, but please rest assured that my plan's purpose is to have Vittescape come out better and brighter than ever before. For my dream to become a reality though, I must ask quite a lot from you. If this is going to happen, I need your full commitment. You must be willing to abandon, and in most cases destroy all of your previously built structures. If we work together, this task should be less daunting, and smoother than you may think. You must be fully dedicated to the well being of the new establishment. Any slacking will cost us time, resources, and a loss of trust. Finally, and most importantly, you must simply agree. None of this will ever be possible if I don't have the support of each and every last one of you. In order for this to work, I am asking for 100% of the Vittescape population to be on board. If there's but a single objection, we can not continue.
     If you are seriously considering this proposal, please reply by posting a comment with your thoughts. I require everybody who joins regularly to state their name and opinion on this issue. In my heart and mind, I know that this is the only method of future progress. United we stand, divided we fall. Remember: This is not the end; it is but only the beginning.

-Thal

Server gonna be down for a bit, installing new ram.

URGENT ALERT (more or less)

Honestly, I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience, but the server won't be down all day on Saturday the 11th - it'll be down all day today. I've decided to bump the date forward a bit. I can't stand the server being so . . . disconfigured.

Sever down on Sat.

LONG VERSION:
Last night I spent five hours updating the server to 1.3.1. Just when I thought I was done, the server started acting very strange and buggy. This is because 1.3.1 is very new, and many of the plugins of Vittescape haven't been released as a recommended build yet - they're still development builds.
As such, Vittescape is going to be very broken, laggy, and broken for probably the rest of today, and possibly tomorrow and the day after. On Saturday I plan to shut Vittescape down for the entire day so I can start over on a clean slate. The world and all your inventory items should all still be there, but everything else - permissions, commands, passwords - pretty much everything will be reset and started over from scratch. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but as it is the server files are a bit of a disorganized mess that need rectification.

SHORT VERSION:
Vitte will be down all day Saturday, 11 August 2012.

    Good news everyone! I've just placed an ebay order for two 1GB memory modules for my laptop! At the moment the server is running off of two 512MB modules for a total of 1GB. With this new memory there will be two gigabytes. This is good for the players because it means 2x server speed, 2x server calculations, and 0.5x lag! I'm hoping it'll make a big difference, because right now the server is utilizing 90% of the current memory - with two gigabytes it should have a little more room to breathe.

After an immense amount of prodding, I have decided to test out the essentials plugin. There are in fact, quite a few aspects of it that seem particularly useful. Because of this, the server will be down for a while. I don't know how long this will be, but I'm expecting it to take about an hour or two.

Hooray! We finally hit 70% uptime! Remeber when I got back and the server was down for four weeks? Well, three weeks later, we're back up to 70! yeah!

Vittescape will be down for a while again - I'll be installing the permissions plugin, and perhaps the worldedit one.

Vittescape'll be down for a few hours - installing new computer peripherals and desk stuff and such.

Passwords, Backups, and Maps

Hey guess what? Vittescape is now encoded with a password plugin! This one so far appears to be much simpler and more user friendly than xauth, so I'm hoping it turns out well. Hopefully, this will prevent accounts from being borrowed/stolen. Also, it means that I can officially turn online mode off, allowing everybody to join again! I've also instituted a backup plugin. It creates a backup of the server every six hours, and saves backups up to a week prior to the latest one. Also, I've configured Dynmap to use a lower resolution map, hopefully reducing lag on the server. Though it isn't as super amazing looking as the hi-res that was previously active, it does still look nice, and functions exactly the same. I've also upped the time it takes to update the map, so here's hoping that'll also reduce lag. Thank you to all those without premium accounts for waiting those long five days while you couldn't join. I look forward to seeing you all again.

I'm pretty sure that the way Dynmap is configured at the moment is causing unnecessary lag, so I'm going to configure it for a bit today.

Lag for the next couple days

There is a TON of lag. It will be here for the next day or two, because I  need to prerender the entire map, and that's a lot of data that has to be processed by a single core cpu! Anyways, I'm hoping it doesn't take more than a couple days. The main area loaded in about an hour, but it's tracing the path we took all the way to Mayor City, so that could take some time. Once that's done it will start a render of the map on the two other templates of surface and cave. After that I'd like to do the same for the nether and the end. Hopefully those two will take considerably less time, being that they are much smaller. Anyways, if three or more people are on at the same time the render will pause, hopefully relinquishing the bandwidth. Anyways, I don't plan to be online much today due to a shelf that I'm going to be cutting out. The map is really awesome, and if you haven't already, I'd advise you to check it out sometime by clicking the map icon on the right side of  the Vittescape website/blog.

Decided 6 was too small, bumped it up to 8. 10 makes 441 chunks load, 8 makes 289 load, where as 6 made 169. 8 is about in the middle, and I'm hoping it runs noticeably smoother than 10. Should reduce connectivity lag and framerate lag.

There is now a real time map available! click the map icon on the right.

In an effort to reduce connectivity lag, I have changed the view distance in the server properties from 10 to 6. This does looks rather crappy in game, but I'm going to test if out for a bit and see if people notice a decrease in lag. This pic is what a view distance of 6 looks like. I may turn it up to 8 if this gets really horrible.

Online Mode

I apologize to all the players that do not own a Minecraft account, but due to accounts being stolen I've had no choice but to enable online mode in the Vittescape server properties. This will make the server check to make sure the player has logged in with their Minecraft username and password. It will prevent free accounts and hacked accounts from being able to join. I'm sorry to make such an elitist move, but the griefing has gone far enough. I hope you understand that I do this in an attempt to make Vittescape a safer, more welcoming place. -Thal

I am rearranging computer appliances in my room, so the Server will be down for a little while today. I doubt it would be longer than two hours, but we'll see.

Server has gone to 24/7. We'll see how it goes.

So I'm halfway through my summer program, and I will be back the weekend after next. Since Desfang has had some difficulties getting the port forwarding working, I've decided to run the server two weeks straight 24/7 on my puny laptop. I don't see any reasons why it'd crash, but there's always the possibility. Unfortunately if this does happen, there's nothing I can do about it. Anyways, Vittescape is back up, and I hope you haven't lost faith in it yet.

So there's been a slight change in plans you see. Desfang won't actually be available tomorrow, so I've sent the server his way, and we spent a couple hours getting it set up. For the most part it's working great! However we couldn't seem to get the firewall to cooperate very well (damn you windows firewall), so right now the firewall isn't actually running. But, the server on the other hand is! In fact it seems to be working quite well, and we'll see where it goes over the next month.

One more thing. Er, actually two.
First: I'm updating the server from 1.2.5 R2.0 to 1.2.5 R3.0. Hopefully, this will end the annoying crashes, though I have my doubts.
Second: When I get back, I will update to 1.3. With this update will come a new world! Quite frankly, the domain of Arkshire, what used to be Heliopolis, Lighthouse, Gaia, etc. It's all really gone to hell. Though I plan to leave that world open, there will also be a new world in it's pure, pristine condition. I'll be the only OP, and everything should work out fine. At the moment, I'm not sure how the whole multiple world thing works, but I'll soon find out.
That is all.

Scratch that; due to lack of any tangible evidence (prejudice and guesses apparently don't count), Seven47 has been unbanned.

So this summer's going to be rather complicated. I don't know when 1.3 will be released, but I hope it's sometime this week (though it probably won't be). As many of you may well be aware, Vittescape will be undergoing some changes with the advent of 1.3. First of all, a new world will be created. One that will have a single OP. This new world will be much more strict than the current one. There will be ZERO tolerance for rule breaking. The current world will still exist, simply as a separate world. When the time comes to update, I will deal with this issue further.

Also: This summer, I'll be taking part in a four week long volunteer service out in the wilderness. We are out twice for five days at a time, and then again once more for two weeks. As you might imagine, this certainly interferes with Vittescape's schedule. However, don't fret! This Friday (June 8), I'll gladly hand the server over to Desfang, who will run it to the best of his abilities while I'm away. Desfang has been a member of Vittescape for a long time, and joins quite regularly. I have full confidence in his ability to run the server responsibly for those four weeks that I'll be gone. To aid in his undertaking, Desfang will become the newest OP of Vittescape this Thursday, the 7th. I hope we can all continue to enjoy the time and effort we've put into the world.

PS: There have recently been numerous accounts of griefing throughout the server. At the current time, many suspect Seven47 to be the cause of this. Until further evidence is found, Seven47 will be banned for an indefinite amount of time.

PPS: Also, for the love of god, stop calling it vitescape, (/'vītscāp/) with one t. It has two. Though there was an error where only one t was in the server name, it has now been rectified. Starting immediately, the domain of vitescape.sytes.net will be terminated. For a long time now, vittescape.sytes.net (/'vitəscāp/) has existed, and that shall be the name that'll live on. enough with this vitescape nonsense.

So a couple things have happened recently. On the fifteenth of this month, Evilscaught left for a vacation, and won't be back until the roughly the end of summer. Because of his departure, I have selected Zarar to be a stand in server administrator until Evilscaught is back. His recent behavior has made me regret this decision, but we'll stick with it. Also, today I updated the server to bukkitcraft 1.2.5 R2.0. So, it won't keep saying it needs an update. I hope you all keep playing on the server, and keep having fun.

PS: all cities are sh*t except for Arkshire, where practically everybody is currently living. So, if you need a place to stay, contact Zarar, Mayor of Arkshire.

RULES! and the server's back up btw

The Blog is now officially up! the server will be back up tomorrow on the nineteenth, and hopefully those annoying glitches that required it to be restarted are gone. Also, This Page has been linked in the welcome message as the location of the rules, so here they are:


RULES
---------
0.) The server's standard operational hours are between 6:00 AM and 9:00 PM Mountain Standard Time.
1.) Secret keeping is a bad practice, as it can lead to many interrogative questions from other players, so building secret houses/towns or using mods without notifying the Admins is frowned upon.
2.) "A griefer is a player in a multiplayer video game who deliberately irritates and harasses other players." this may include nagging, spamming, unauthorized fire ignition, immaturity, unnecessary violence, and above all, destruction/vandalism/theft of property that you do not own. Don't be a griefer.
3.) Admins are to be respected. do not beg an Admin for anything; instead, ask politely. Do not piss off an Admin. Do not make rude comments pertaining to an Admin, in the presence of said Admin. Do not grief an Admin. No, Admins will not cheat. Begging an Admin to "tp me!" or "give me creative!" or god forbid, "make me admin!" or anything similar will upset an Admin, for this server allows nothing of the sort. Do not upset an Admin.
4.) Above all else, DO NOT CHEAT. Cheaters never prosper, and ruin the game for normal non-cheating players. Cheating will ALWAYS result in a ban. Cheating includes X-Ray, X-Ray like texture packs that make blocks invisible, the TooManyItems mod, and any adaptation or modification of the game files that changes game-play in any way. Optifine and similar mods that enhance game-play without actually bending rules (fundamental rules such as mechanics, recipes, difficulty levels, movement constrictions, etc.) are allowed, for they are mostly harmless. If there are any doubts, ask an admin.
5.) Cutting down other players is strictly forbidden, except when notified otherwise. Unless absolutely necessary, harming other players is also strictly forbidden.
6.) Theft is not permitted. Do not steal from others' chests, even if you intend to replace the removed item(s). Do not take from any non-public chest (such as a community chest) without prior permission from the owner of the chest. Trespassing is also not permitted. Do not enter anybody's room without their permission. This sometimes makes players feel uneasy. Do not steal someone's identity either, by means such as logging into their account on a hacked Minecraft. That is a BIG no no, and will result in a ban.
7.) Do not attempt to modify server files, or change permissions of other players, or try to change your own permissions.
8.) Adherence to these rules is mandatory to play on Vittescape.


Welcome to Vittescape!

Welcome to the Vittescape Blog! Yes, you probably noticed that the name has been changed. That's one of the many things that will appear on this site: changes. Any updates, any new plugins, any bans, anything! Vittescape Also has a facebook group here, however not everybody has a facebook account. So, I created this blog to work in tandem with the facebook page, and keep everybody up to date. However, in the future, I plan to use this site as a rule book as well. Seeing as some of the rules of Vittescape are slightly complicated, and as pointed out have some major loopholes, they will eventually be elaborated here in excruciating detail (hopefully).

Now that that's out of the way, I plan to update the server's plugins to their versions that are compatible with the current version of the Bukkit server Installed. Also with this update, I expect to implement further strategical efforts to reduce, if not eliminate cheaters, hackers, and any player who behaves in an unruly manner. Vittescape is a place for people to have fun within the original boundaries of Minecraft. I will not tolerate those who insist on bending the rules, exploiting loopholes, creating unfair advantages, and making the game miserable for others; they will be face the consequences of a perma-ban. A perma-ban is a permanent ban of the player. Perma-bans are reserved for the worst offenders, and are not delivered without much prior thought. That said, try to enjoy your time at Vittescape, and have fun! After all, why else might you be playing Minecraft?