This was a community I operated and moderated between 2011-2014. It was a Minecraft server that started with some local players from my friend circle that were looking for a community to play with. After opening it up to the public, the community reached 75,000 unique registrations after its 5 year life span. It was a fantastic hobby project during my time studying at university where the majority of my time went into development and player relations including events and community management.

The website was written in PHP 5 and made heavy use of MySQL and integration with phpBB for account access. The custom authentication allowed a player to register in-game or via the forum and access the same account. This site also integrated with “top 100” websites, where players would vote for their favourite community and that would bump the server up in the tier list, exposing the server to more potential players. This included rewarding players in-game with a small thank-you for boosting the server and helping grow the community. An oddly challenging feat to integrate!

The server was operated on an Ubuntu machine remotely hosted in a cheap data centre that was paid for through player donations. I administrated this almost entirely through SSH and this was an incredibly valuable experience for me to learn to operate a Linux server.

During my administration, I wrote a dozen or more server-side plugins in Java. These included tools for:

  • Looking up item names using a trie
  • Raytracing a players view to prevent interaction through walls
  • Custom PvP modes including last-man-standing survival challenges
  • Administering account penalties on the server - kicks, mutes, bans
  • Player to player item sales and transfers through in-game currency

A number of these were even published on Bukkit!

Eventually, I handed over the community to another player and moved on to working full-time. The community is no longer active, but I received a message years later from the new owner thanking me for the guidance I provided, and he credited me with his success in starting his career in software development, which was a very proud moment for me. I never imagined I would have such an impact on peoples lives when I started a gaming community.