A creative Minecraft 1.20.4 server for transportation and city-building enthusiasts.
A creative Minecraft 1.20.4 server for transportation and city-building enthusiasts.

March 2023 GSM Results

Here are the results of the March 2023 GSM.

Missing Chunks on Dynmap

Last month, Simon and I completed a full dynmap render of the New World. However, you may have noticed some missing chunks that haven’t been rendered. We’re working to solve this issue and we’ll be doing some analysis of these chunks in the coming weeks, so please stay tuned for any upcoming announcements regarding these chunks.

New Conductor

Only one Conductor candidate was considered at this GSM: ReallyTuck. They were promoted to the position by a 7-0-0 vote. Congratulations to ReallyTuck for becoming our newest Conductor!

Community Issues

Initiatives to attract new players

In the past few months, we’ve seen the lowest ever numbers of new guests and incoming member applications in the server’s history. If this trend were to continue, it would not bode well for the longevity of this server. Therefore, we are going to take some unprecedented steps to attract new players to the server:

Advertising the server on Planet Minecraft and r/mcservers

Frumple will look at creating a Planet Minecraft page for the server, and also look at advertising the server on the r/mcservers subreddit.

Explore the possibility of opening the Discord to the public

Simon will look at creating a temporary Discord server that will illustrate how the MRT Discord might look if we were to open it up to the public. Some early ideas of what this could look like are as follows:

  • Anyone who joins the Discord for the first time will initially have access to a single channel, which will instruct them to join the Minecraft server and link their Minecraft and Discord accounts together.
  • Once they are linked, they will have see a few more channels, but will only be able to talk in a limited number of channels, such as a #general channel and #requests-to-staff.

Once the community has been able to see this temporary “template”, there will be a formal GSM topic and survey to decide if we should proceed with opening up the Discord to the public in this manner.

Note that these initiatives are in addition to the following actions that have already been taken:

  • As mentioned previously, we have signed for the Syscraft Server Showcase. However, we do not know when this showcase will be happening.
  • For the first 3 days of each month, there is now an automated hourly reminder that is shown in-game and on the #minecraft-server channel in discord to vote up the server on several server lists.

No major changes to Moderator Nomination process

The staff have conducted a review of the current Moderator Nomination process, and have agreed to make Skelezomperman’s amendment permanent. His amendment will make it so that a moderator candidate will now be considered at a GSM if the candidate receives:

  • Two or more nominations, OR
  • A single nomination submitted by two or more authors (where each author contributes at least one piece of evidence or testimony to the nomination)

Outside of this change, however, we have decided that we are not going to make any further changes to the process at this time and in the near future. This topic of changing the nomination process has come up several times before, but unfortunately none of the proposed solutions are viable, so we would like to shelve this discussion for the foreseeable future and focus on other important topics.

Player statue ban repealed

A proposal by Skelezomperman to remove the ban on player statues has been approved.

This ban on player statues has been in place since the beginning of the server in July 2012, originally intended to encourage players on the Old World to build towns rather than self-serving statues of themselves. Since then, there have been only a few violations of this rule, with the last one being in 2014.

This rule no longer makes sense for the realities of the New World and our current community, so we have decided to repeal the ban. However, if we find a member who decides to build a whole bunch of statues that don’t seem to serve any purpose, we may still issue warnings based on the spamming rule.

Plan (Player Analytics) plugin to be installed soon

The main Minecraft server will be down for maintenance about 1 hour on Monday, March 13th starting at 4pm UTC (please take note of Daylight Savings Time that will be effect). The Plan plugin will be installed on to the server, which will provide administrators a greater ability to track player activity over days/weeks/months, and track conductor/staff activity levels. Members will be able to register themselves on to the Plan website, where they can see their own activity statistics.

For more information about how the Plan plugin will be used on the server, please see the meeting agenda or the Discord topic in #community-issues.

Stonks plugin will be tried out on beta server

Staff have given approval to purchase the Stonks plugin (Spigot login required), which adds a stock market functionality to the server. It will be configured and tested out thoroughly on beta server, and assuming it is viable for the main server, there will be a full GSM topic to discuss the plugin at a later date.

That is all for this GSM. See you at the next GSM on Sunday, April 9 at 7pm UTC. Please note that Daylight Savings Time and British Summer Time will be in effect starting from this GSM.