Old Promotion System Removed

The old promotion system has been completely removed as the new one is working out fine and catching everyone that had been missed, please be aware that the requirements for Member rank have changed slightly and is now configured as:

A minimum of 15 minutes play time on 7 different days.

From Monday all players will be able to check progress towards Member rank accurately themselves, all staff will also be able check the progress of individuals or all players online with a simple command.

Scheduled Downtime On Monday

There will be another another scheduled downtime  on Monday for what are hopefully the last of the major technical changes in preparation for January.

1. Take a full backup/clone.
2. Update TekkitRestrict.
3. Update 3 mod patches.
4. Test updates.
5. Switch to new rank colours and add new ranks (more details coming soon).
6. Permissions cleanup.
7. Test colours are applied correctly and ranks promote in correct order.
8. Tweak auto-promote plugin.
9. Make around 30 changes to permissions, specifically relating to Staff ranks.
10. Test permission changes.
11. Clear out some old and redundant data.

Downtime Monday;
Start:    9:00am (UK)
Finish:  10:30am? (UK)

Casino Slots Change

I've made a quick change to the Tech Slots in the casino, from now the bottom prizes will be scrap boxes rather than exp to add a little more variety.

Enjoy!

New Promotion Plugin

The trial of the new promotion system starts today, unfortunately though as a side effect the times shown by /seen & /playtime have had to be reset so we are all starting at 0 again.

If you've missed out on promotion don't worry we will get to you, I'm running the old check every two hours as well for the time being to try and catch everyone.

I'll post more details on the new plugin and what it means for the way promotions work very soon.

UPDATE: 

I've turned on a feature that will attempt to calculate a players first join date from the main player data file, this will work better for some than others and will always give a slight underestimate at best, however for new players waiting for Member rank this should help get you closer to the usual 1 week! The calculation is individual and will take place the next time the player joins the server (may take several minutes from login).

Down For Maintenance

The server is down for scheduled maintenance as follows:

1. Apply management interface update - Done.
2. Full backup/clone - Done.
3. Disable all portals and set up warps to replace them - Done
4. Update spawn to fit with changes - Done.
5. Replace multi-world plugin and set up permissions - Done (took a lot longer than planned!).
6. Remove all old plugin permissions from main permissions file - Done.
7. Make several config changes - Done.
8. Fully test relevant changes - Done.
9. Install and configure new auto-promote plugin (trial) - Done.

I'll update here as things progress.

Moderators can connect but I may be afk doing config changes and there will be restarts.

The server is now open and the whitelist has been removed!

World Issues & The Future

As some of you already know we've had a few random restarts over the last week or so, I can confirm that with one exception these were chunk problems being detected and fixed.

I have been monitoring this and the crashes, although still a significant time apart, are becoming more frequent, I have tried every available tool to try and correct the root cause of the the problem with no success. Although to be honest any fix would be unlikely to be a long term solution, most chunk repair tools I tried would require removing 20% or more of the worlds chunks, leaving it in quite a mess with a large number sudden terrain / biome changes in a straight line, many peoples regions reset or possibly cut in half etc, and with no guarantee that the issues wouldn't return a month or so later.

As I'm sure most of you know most Tekkit Classic servers with similar player numbers to us reset the world every 2-3 months or have regular rollbacks for this very reason, so we are actually quite lucky that our map has lasted 7-8 months without a single rollback of more than a few minutes required, especially when you consider that on an average day we have 300+ players log in and have an average of over 400,000 block changes.

Again some of you already know that I've been working hard behind the scenes to try and keep the server running without my major involvement next year due to other commitments and this has included the building of a new spawn, the intention now is to keep the new spawn where it is and make that a new world to replace the current one. 

However there is still significant work to be done before we can switch and I am unsure whether we can support 2 full size worlds at the same time so whilst I hope to be able to transfer builds across at least for VIP's, Staff & hopefully Member+ players I really cannot say at this point what will and won't be possible. For now though please make use of VIP Island and The Vault to backup your items just in case things get significantly worse and we suddenly have to switch worlds with little or no notice.

I'm also concerned that the process of switching etc may be so time consuming that it may hinder my chances of getting the server ready for January, as always I'll try my best but cannot make any promises at the moment as this is incredibly bad timing and it makes testing some of the required changes very difficult due to random errors and the possibility of more serious crashes relating to the main world having the potential to cause problems with mods/plugins and other worlds (I had to replace a couple of mods and a plugin with fresh copies after a crash yesterday).

So please encourage your friends etc to make use of The Vault and keep your fingers crossed that I can work things out for the long term, I will post updates here as soon as I know more.