Does Minetown have any plugins that allow passive mob killing (or any type of mob killing) to be turned off for a region? This feature exists in at least one plugin listed on the bukkit dev site, AreaGuard. Note, I'm not suggesting MT use AreaGuard; I'm just saying that the feature is possible to implement.

If not, maybe someone could suggest a solution to my problem. Here's the situation: I'm making an artificial NPC village so that when Minecraft 1.3 comes out, I can trade with each type of villager (See the Minecraft wiki for info on trading). I used my villager spawner to spawn 4 villagers (it only spawns the default type: Farmer), so to get the other types I built a village and the 4 villagers are breeding (the offspring are of random types). I think it'd be neat to allow people to come and trade with my villagers, but I don't want someone coming and killing all of the villagers (repopulating through breeding takes a long time, not to mention the work of placing a spawner to get things started). Any ideas for protecting the villagers?

Great idea. If the access is free for the members and available for everyone, I think that Minetown should get a basic plugin for this. However, that is only if we implement emerald as a currency, which is currently being discussed. If it's not implemented as such, they might not consider it for one person. However, if it is implemented we should start a petition (polled forum) and get everyone to vote yes on it so that we can get this plugin for you, because I'd love to trade all my rotten flesh (I've been saving them because I thought there might be a use for them in the future, hehe).

This feature, disabling passive mob killing, is useful in other situations too. For example, it could be used to protect a colored sheep farm from griefing... people could sheer the sheep but not kill them.

I don't see it used in that situation, tomcort. Most of those sheep operations use spawners. I'm not trying to say you're wrong. You might be wrong, you might be right. I might be wrong, I might be right. I'm just thinking from a more objective standpoint, but I'm not saying that you're not being objective either. There may be things I see that you don't, and/or there may be things you see that I don't. However, I know that most large sheep operations utilize at least one spawner (every single sheep operation I've seen has used 1+ spawners). In addition, most people know to only sheer and not kill sheep as you get more wool from sheering than killing.

my friend has one of these, i dont think he has spawners

You could just keep some villagers hidden somewhere (underground) and always have a steady supply. Or just tell people not to kill them or you will be banned.

The hard part is implementing this so that the villagers can repopulate the village themselves without my intervention. Perhaps the best solution is to make the village huge and /cprivate every door (villagers can open cprivate'd wooden doors but unauthorized players cannot).

Only staff can decide on punishments, and I don't think there is an easy way (or any way) for staff to check/prove who killed the villagers. I don't think there is a log of passive mob kills, and you can't tell anything from the item pick-up logs because Villagers don't have any drops, not even XP.

I just read on the minecraft wiki that in 1.3 villager eggs will spawn villagers of different professions (not just farmer). I assume this might also apply to villager spawners. If that's the case, I don't need to worry about people killing the non-Farmer villagers because I have a spawner. For now, please disregard this thread.

You can only disable passive mob killing on the third Saturday of every other month in the third fiscal year of the summer and spring only, provided that the Saturday is the 14th