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Username: ronvandorp

When you were banned : 1st or 2nd of March 2012

Person who banned you: unknown

Reason you were banned: unknown, I was not online at the time.

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BAN: Lomanic banned name 'Ronvandorp': Abuse of Spawners and Mob Eggs, Hawkeye recoded with physical evidence.

Please wait for Lomanic.

Okay, that solves the who.

I am still a bit fuzzy on the why? I was the one who reported the mob egg / spawner issue.

I will be doing a full log trace on this entire set of issues soon enough. Please be patient as it will likely take a few hours for me to trace down all the pertinent activities through logs.

Okay, please let me know when you are done.

I will be in contact with Cryston about this. I will message you privatly with more details later on as due to the nature of this ban some details need not be made public to avoid future issues. In the mean time I will tell you that there were a large number of spawners and eggs that you were not supposed to have aside fro ones that were provided for your zoo. We are looking into the issue but due to the severity of the issue a ban was warranted. If you could please explain the possession of some of the items you had, i.e. multiple spawners of varieites you are not supposed to have, it will help speed along the process.

Ah, I see, now I understand what the problem was.

Originally when I received the silverfish and ghast spawners (note, this was before the rules against them!) I placed them in the zoo. It turned out I had an excess. Too many animals were spawning. Once there are too many they start glitching through the walls and eventually escape. I do not have to explain why that would be an issue. I took serious security measures to prevent this from happening, including making the entire nether part of the zoo three layers thick. This was a lot of (invisible) extra work which only shows that I take spawner security quite serious. Ghasts can never escape from the zoo, even with all plug-ins off. Silverfish are harder to contain but can never escape that floor of the zoo.

I did not want to throw the excess spawners away because there have been A LOT of issues with spawners in the past and I wanted to keep these as backup for the zoo. Using them in a mob grinder would not have been fair to other players, so I didn't.

Putting them as spawners in a chest was not an option because, as we all know, when Bukkit gave out all spawners reverted to default (pig). I was doing maintenance in our mob grinder that day and half the spawners turned to pig. I did not want that to happen again.

Putting them as eggs in a chest was also not an option. I myself was the one who reported the spawner "duplication" bug. When I came with that knowledge to the staff, it was not unlikely that the turning-eggs-to-spawners plug-in would be decommissioned. In other words, eggs might become useless.

The only spawners we never had issues with, are spawners placed somewhere in the world. I took all possible security measures: the room was too small for ghasts to spawn; it was well-lit so silverfish could not spawn; it was in a protected area with spawning turned off; it was somewhere no one could reach or see it in the middle of nowhere.

I understand if you want to take these spawners away. But please, if the ghast and silverfish spawners in the zoo are ever destroyed for whatever inconceivable reason, I would like them to be replaced. Spawner plug-ins have had considerable issues.

I hope this long explanation will suffice, I am available for any follow up questions.

Last I would like to say that I often come to staff with often very serious bugs. I was the one who reported the Bukkit spawner-to-pigs issue and the tradecraft item stacking issue. I also reported the very bug for which I ironically ended up being banned for. Just earlier this week I reported a serious security bug to the staff.

I can confirm parts of ron's story.

In the region he made this little hidden room he let me do a no mob spawning flag before, I guess for extra security, which is good when you deal with silverfish and ghasts.

Also I can confirm that ron was the one who told me something wierd was possible with the spawners when he was working on the zooshow, we then proceeded to do some testing together to find out how to do this bug later on. I told ron that this was a pretty serious bug and that I would report it to an admin, ron then asked me if we would take down plugins again and I said that it could be very possible till the bug was dealt with.

So I understand ron got a little paranoid/scared since the history of these plugins.... we lost lots of things because of it in the past. (tons of spawners turning into pig, tons of highly enchanted and expensive pickaxes, swords etc turning useless and tons of animals despawning in a chunk often when breeding was just introduced just to name a few things).

Ill try to not involve in ron's ban too much since im his cousin it might look wierd, but I just wanted to confirm these things.

Ok, I am going to unban you. Looking into this, this is completly plausible. You only had an excess of 1 or two of each spawner. In the future though you need to inform staff if you have too many of a forbidden item that you have been allowed to have by an exception. If we have granted that exception for a good reason we will replace the item if something happens.

Granted keep in mind should something fishy show up in the log checks we will take action, but it doesnt look like it will for you Ron. thank you for your patience.

Thank you, Lomanic.

It is fine, I understand how this is an issue that had severe effects on the entire economy. Considering our city has thrived on wool (from spider spawners) since we originally started using mbox, the spawner duplication (especially sheep!) actually hurt our city more than average.

You have got to appreciate the irony though, banned twice in one week indirectly for the bugs I reported xD.