Okay -- that still doesn't address that Phoenix emailed Crafty a ban appeal and was able to get the permaban from the server and suspension from the forums reverted.

> Everyone has to put their ban appeal in public.

So which of these appeals, then, was responsible for reverting the 14 Aug 2019 ban? Unless there is a hidden one I can't view, there are only these ones:

ThePhoenix's Discord Ban Appeal

ThePhoenix's Ban Appeal

Unban appeal

Ban Appeal

The Phoenix Discord Unban Request

Only the first one seems to be causally related to 14 Aug 2019, and that one implied that the server unban already happened.

If there isn't one then, again, I go back to my point about the whole inconsistency thing. If you've been banned from absolutely everywhere because you're excessively toxic to the staff and players, and all that's needed to revert that is a sad written email, that's not a good outlook for the moderation at all. The fact that even happened and it was quietly swept under the rug was always unsettling to me, to be honest.

@Tez1010 All players are welcome to message Crafty with complaints about their bans or treatment. At the end of the day it is his server and his final ruling.

I get many players messaging me about their various bans and complaints. In such cases these are always investigated and shared in admin and a collegiate decision made. Where consensus cannot be obtained this is passed to Crafty.

I do not see how this can be made public.

We always endeavour to be as fair as possible.

So to clarify, you're stating that it's possible to privately appeal outside of the forums ("messaging me") despite the FAQ stating otherwise?

What happens if I get banned?
... You do have the right to appeal your ban on the website (http://forum.craftymynes.com/conversations/ban-appeals). Start a new thread under the Ban Appeals section. Do not post your ban appeal at the bottom of someone else's ban appeal.

Can you unban ___?
The forums are the only place you could address your ban. In-Game-Chat nor Discord are the places for ban appeals. ...

If that is the case, that just goes back to my point about inconsistency. There are apparently two methods to appeal a ban: one is clearly documented and the most transparent for the community; the other one is secret, can happen literally anywhere like email or Discord, and blatantly contradicts what was publicly stated.

@Th3GreenGamer (I cut out everything I'm not responding to for simplicity)
For the part I bolded: This is an easy one. We are trying to come to a more reasonable approach to somebody seen to be using Lunar, schematic mods or hud mods etc. that are not cheating mods. We won't be unbanning all previous accounts banned for these things because we don't recall the specific circumstance of every single ban in the past 10 years. Not to mention that it's a monumental task for almost no returns. Maybe if they specifically appeal it would be considered, I don't know. And don't take that previous sentence as gospel, it's just my thought personally.

Thank you for the clarification. It helps if these decisions made using rules that aren't yet written down can specify that "there are planned changes to the rules which would lead to this corrected decision." As it stands, "the admins have decided to revert this decision" doesn't clarify that at all, and just makes the decision making look inconsistent.

@Th3GreenGamer (I cut out everything I'm not responding to for simplicity)
Also there was no exchange between any staff and Phoenix about the ban. I don't believe Crafty and Phoenix had ever even spoken to eachother.

This wasn't necessarily what I was getting at. I can understand that the decision for the "schematica ban" was made behind closed doors between the admins and Crafty, without the input of any other normal player, using the knowledge that the rules will be changing in the future. However, during the "portal grief ban" in 2019, let's call it that -- Phoenix was, notably, egregiously toxic to staff members in response to his punishment, in such a way that his ban was elevated to a permanent one , and the only form of recourse given to him was to email an appeal to owner@craftymynes.com.

Unless he privately messaged another high-ranking staff member to unban him much later, it is reasonable to assume that he took that only measure to appeal the permaban by directly emailing CraftyMyner. Either way, both scenarios are not particularly good for transparency since the appeal process happened entirely behind closed doors. To this day, it is unknown to the general playerbase how Phoenix was unbanned, because no ban appeal can be found on the forums for it.

Privately messaging or emailing a staff member to circumvent the ban appeal process is not a good thing for the community in general. Coupled with the decision to correct the punishment for the "schematica ban" it really doesn't look good.

@Slainte_Alainn At the end of the day, CraftyMynes is owned by CraftyMyner.
If he decides to unban everyone then he has that right, if he decides to ban everyone, he has that right.

"It's crafty's server and he can do whatever he wants" is a thinly veiled euphemism for "we don't have any way to hold staff accountable." All major communities nowadays have a code of conduct which applies to everyone in the community, which includes both the members and moderators/staff of the community.

Everyone has a reasonable expectation of how moderators will act based on the CoC, and they are given an outline of a mechanism to follow when the moderation team acts out of line, usually via some kind of community management team that acts independently of the moderators or admins. This ensures that everyone will act in line and enforce community guidelines fairly.

As it stands, CM has no CoC or any mechanism that holds everyone (including the staff) accountable. The rules are applied to just member infractions, whilst inconsistencies in how those rules are enforced are brushed off as "the staff can do whatever they want," which you are doing right now with this very hollow-worded PR/ChatGPT-esque response. This builds absolutely no assurance in anyone that the staff will act consistently in a way the playerbase would expect.

Again, this is not a positive sign for a community that is struggling to retain players.

Crafty does own the server -- but, he, and you, and the rest of the admins, since Green said the "admins and Crafty" came to the decision, should be able to explain why Phoenix was pardoned for using schematic mods, and how that logic doesn't also exempt the actions of previously banned "cheaters" -- for example, the countless number of people using Lunar Client for minimaps (which have been accepted recently) and the armor hud (which is being replicated by other client side mods).

Here's some questions that I hope will illustrate the problem:

• What is wrong with armor hud? Does it provide an advantage over vanilla players? Surely, minimaps and schematics do too because they make the lives of their users easier?
• If they provide an advantage but it's an "acceptable" advantage like schematic supposedly brings, would armor hud be okay now? If so, given that Lunar client is used for its minimap and armor hud, if we accept both of these features then there's no real reason to ban people for using Lunar client and keep them banned, right?
• If we can't allow Lunar client, why do we allow these other mods? Doesn't that make this an inconsistent enforcement of the rules? Shouldn't the rules be changed to reflect this?

If there is a change to the rules that relaxes the punishments for what mods can and can not be used, this needs to be codified in a rule. It can not be decided by staff secretly making a decision in a private Discord channel that nobody from the outside can scrutinize. That's just a sheer lack of transparency, and again casts doubt on whether the staff can consistently enforce rules in this community in the first place.

Anyways, I don't care how Phoenix acts nowadays because I don't actively play on CM anymore, and all of that drama between him and me and Team Eye and the staff was all pretty much half a decade ago. This isn't some attempt to revive a grudge against someone I've previously had beef with.

What bothers me is the fact that staff is selecting one particular person and giving them so many chances excusing bannable behavior, without any clear reasoning behind it. Meanwhile, others were left permanently banned for using a minimap on Lunar Client with no second chances.

There's also gnomechild who would just say dumb shit in chat, and then got himself permanently banned and exiled from the community for typing ".crash," with absolutely no second chances. How does it make any sense that a bunch of chat infractions would be treated harsher than portal griefing spawn, disrespecting staff's authority in Discord, making sexist remarks on International Women's Day, and using unapproved mods? Those are all four different infractions that would all warrant lengthy bans on their own.

Staff decisions about bans have been incredibly questionable, to be honest the fact that Phoenix's permaban was overturned because of a private email exchange between him and Crafty that nobody would ever be able to scrutinize was the seed that really planted my doubts in the longevity of CraftyMynes as a community. All of these haphazard changes to staff policy in a desperate bid to retain the existing playerbase just reinforce my doubts in the server.

It's hard to take CraftyMynes seriously anymore, whatnot with Crafty's inconsistent re-appearances and months-long hiatuses, the general lack of staff consistency (a mod bans for use of unauthorized mods, well established as a permanently bannable offense, then their decision gets overturned by an admin because of a secret "decision" between the admins). We can't level any constructive criticism in an effort to help improve the server because the head guy who has the power to do anything disappears for months at a time, and then writes some long windy response about how he has no time for the server anymore. But he rectifies a permaban almost immediately and very actively communicates in the discord all of a sudden -- yeah, I totally buy that.

Everyone who has participated in running any sizable community knows the key thing to moderation is consistency. Everyone know how they should act and treat others, because they've seen what the staff will otherwise do to rulebreakers, time and time again. The moment you introduce exceptions and favoritism, the whole thing falls apart and nobody wants to participate in the community anymore.

I have literally no idea what will get you banned on CraftyMynes anymore, I have no idea if some dude dicking around with client mods in spawn or Lunar client will get banned anymore. Maybe they will get banned because it's an unapproved mod, or maybe they won't because the staff have all of a sudden decided that unapproved mods aren't allowed except for the ones they like, or maybe it's because there's nepotism in the inner circle of admins because of some secret emails between that person and the owner that were sent. Do the other banned players who spam slurs and sexist shit on the server get a free pass for their behavior by emailing the owner some sob story? This is absolutely not a positive outlook for any new players looking for a stable community to join.

Oh, and before you guys try and go at us because we're Team Eye, at least we've followed the rules, and if we fuck that up we take full responsibility. ;)

lets make a new discord for a server that pulls in like 3 new players per month at most. that will definitely solve the problem guys.

its not that the entire vanilla community has moved on from vanilla smp and craftymynes has done nothing to keep itself relevant.

its not that the past community was alienated away because of issues like lag and game breaking bugs which could have been fixed with a well planned move away from mojang software designed for 11 players (minecraft realms) to competent server software that every other competing server benefited from.

it's not that staff presence has been nonexistent to where i'm willing to bet $1000 that random kiddos have been fly hacking and xraying everywhere on a 1-3 max player server, and that the staff members that still gave a damn before realized these types of communities and servers have lifespans, this one has run its course, and they need to move on.

yeah its the discord, its all the shitposting that happens in it because absolutely nothing else happens in the community. "discard" all of the old players currently in the discord and instead make a new discord so then 20 'people max can join it and it just turns into another ghost town. its not like the server has functioned perfectly well without a discord in the past and in fact was using teamspeak during the height of its popularity.

@Schlocked cm is doomed tbh

^^^

here is why cm is dead

1. horribly mismanaged, staff presence is nonexistent and do not engage with the community. the discord is less active than some 10 member private discord
2. horrible server software, switch to semi vanilla already. many incredibly game breaking things ruining the server experience in the past could've been resolved with a seamless switch to paper or something else actually competent, but there is this obnoxiously obsessive compulsion to stick with official mojang vanilla software. "blame it on mojang" doesnt work as an excuse anymore when there is an objectively better choice to make
3. vanilla minecraft is running out of steam, sorry, pack things up and move on

is there any fix to these problems? in principle, yep, but pragmatically, nope lol. i have exhaustively discussed these issues for the past 6 years or so, especially the semi vanilla change, and i'm always met with the same adamance over and over again. it is literally pointless to mentally invest any further in a server that refuses to change

Yes, because the actual, tangible benefits from using better software outweigh the cognitive dissonance from challenging dogmatic beliefs that otherwise just make us feel good inside.

Should I be blunt? "We are pure vanilla which is good" is textbook dogma that has plagued this server for years now. We keep seeing the negative effects of this belief over and over and over again, and yet we must continue to use Mojang's jar, because this is true and good and unquestionable. Like I said, textbook dogma.

Only like 5 or 6 remotely active players still care, and the player counts speak for itself. Keep in mind this server used to pull in 20-40 players regularly at its peak. The rest of the player base who value an actual better server experience quit years ago and will never voice their dissenting opinions here for that reason.

From a pragmatic standpoint I believe the server's current playstyle/experience skews things far more in the semi-vanilla direction than plugins and mods which fix the game's issues ever will.

Ordinary players aren't going to care about things like thunder hack being patched with a plugin (because they're typically not cheaters), insta-kill bow hacks being patched with a plugin (because they're typically not cheaters), or server lag being optimized (because less or even no lag benefits the vanilla experience).

Things like ranks, homes, .commands, custom spawn, monthly CraftyCrate giveaways, server jails, minigames, etc, even if they are *technically* implemented with command blocks, third party software running in the background, and external web APIs, are far more likely to be noticed and singled out by players as being "semi-vanilla" like. The standard Minecraft/Minecraft Realms experience simply doesn't provide any of these features.

To rephrase things in a more conclusive way, I think it's okay to be semi-vanilla with plugins and lie about it. The server lists don't care anymore as Dennari alleged in this very thread, so that diplomatic excuse is gone. And it would be a white lie anyways, because regardless of semi-vanilla status the server still wouldn't go out of its way to create an experience far removed from vanilla that it would scare off players looking for a SMP experience.

As long as the semi-vanilla things work invisibly in the background to benefit the vanilla experience of the player base, this single aspect doesn't detract from being "vanilla" at all, and nobody should really care about it unless they're just dogmatically opposed to it.

@Tez1010 Getting new people to join is mainly down to three things - votes, *critical mass*

Critical mass - players don't join if they see 0 players on the server. They may as well play sp. They start to join if they see 3 or 4. Maybe some of the staff and loyal players can watch for the numbers being low and join even if they are mainly afk or just for a few minutes.

I agree with critical mass being a factor (in fact I would argue it's the most important factor), however the threshold is empirically not 3-4 players. We should otherwise be seeing brand new players join literally all the time because the server always has 3-4 players online on average, and a handful of those should be sticking around. But they aren't and the server hardly ever reaches above 10 players, I was surprised when I saw it reached 14 at one time but I haven't seen that number since. In my opinion that threshold is around 15-20 regular players.

Regardless of where that threshold is, there's a major antagonistic force against player retention and growth that prevents the server from going above 10 players, which you might have already guessed is the Mojang server jar. It's designed for Minecraft Realms numbers of players which is 11 max; Mojang is financially incentivized to optimize for this target since Realms is their first party paid hosting service.

We have seen it, time and time again, over and over again, that when the server has 15 players all operating in independent base chunks we start seeing extreme server lag. Every time there's a map reset the server lags to hell and back because there's like 30 people all loading independent chunks.

Critically is good and all, but when there's an opposing force conveniently above the criticality threshold that makes new players quit because they don't want to play on a "laggy, crappy server," suddenly criticality, player retention, and welcoming means squat. There's even a thread here that specifically petitions to switch to semi-vanilla to fix "extreme server lag" as one of the reasons.