abandoned or half destroyed structures not in use.

the reset area is the. Yellow. Box in the live map

The main problem which comes to my mind is to determine what is actually destroyed and what can be considered "destroyed by design".

So while thinking things over I was wondering about it....

When the Frontier cleaners (?) come across a structure which could be a destroyed building they leave a sign which says "Repair?" on the first line, the date on the second line and their own name on the third. This sign should be placed in a recognizable area around (or on) the structure. Maybe even 2 or three.

Then we wait for one week. If the original owner (or a co-owner) comes across the build then they can contact the Frontier cleaner and tell them that the structure is in use, or not in need of repairs, etc, etc. The cleaner can move on.

If the cleaner doesn't hear back after a week they can then file a request with the staff for them to check the building themselves and come up with a possible primary owner (or owners). If the player(s) are derelict then the cleaner gets permission to repair or remodel the structure. Nothing drastically, just so that it looks better within the environment.

If the owners of said structure aren't derelict then nothing happens at all.

This method could probably use some more tuning, but I think it could help to ensure that no active structures get accidentally changed while also making sure that the staff doesn't get too much requests about all this.

Maybe food for thought?

I sincerely doubt that the staff would start banning when players make an honest (and harmless!) mistake. But griefing is still a bannable offense, and because of that I think there should be some punishment if players take things too far, no matter how good their intentions were.

I guess 90% can be determined rather easily:
- small houses with small farms / small bases
- temporary shelters
- temporary mining facilities
- temporary mob fighting facilities (wither, momentus, "hunting grounds")
- ways, roads and rail tracks
- bigger buildings that were meant to attract visitors
- structures for public use

See my posting above - a time frame much bigger that town derelict policy is needed.
I have some useful structures that I visit 2 or 3 times per year in average. Not on the surface though.

That's the basic "derelict policy" idea.

The main problem is that it is hardly possible to determine if there is an owner / an user of the structure. A much larger time frame is needed. Sometimes new people populate long abandoned and forgotten outposts.

They can still be contacted and asked.

Of course they wouldn't!
The question is why you (and not only you) while trying to encourage people to participate for a good cause, why do you at the same time need to mention / discuss griefing and capital punishment. Doing that is probably the most effective way to kill enthusiasm and repel people.

Which in my opinion doesn't have to be a bad thing perse. Because in the end we'd still be 'messing' with other player structures which IMO requires a great sense of responsibility. This only emphasizes on that.

IMHO, that's just a very wrong and un-motivating way to emphasize on need for great(er) sense of responsibility.
(It's probably (again) only in my head, but I see a pattern there. Off topic here.
Would you help old lady cross the street? That would be nice. But be careful, if something happens to her, you might be tried for murder and hanged.)

what i remember being told is that repairing a broken house or structure is not griefing. at the same time, breaking down noob poles and filling in holes is also not griefing.

me and perry split the reconstruction to that particular area and within a week of starting to make it look nice someone came and moved in and built a big ugly cobble mess.



now i just maintain the small lush jungle you see in the red circle the yellow area is creeper ridden and returned to the destroyed look i had already repaired it from.

there needs to be some kind of encroachment rule put forth on emc where people cant just come in and ruin builds and you cant do anything about it because it isnt 3k out.

as you can see i got rid of alot of the blasted away area's in the ocean and spent time filling them in with water, but people come monthly and ruin it again slowly chipping away at all my work.

Thank you Tuq! Ok so the start of the rail and road at all of ours is going to be chopped off at some point with a reset. Not a biggie. Peps is gonna be bummed because his entire build is in the yellow area. Luckily, his place is pretty cheap and easy to recreate, and many of us will totally help him do that when that time comes.

There are challenges to overcome, and policies to determine, but I haven't seen anyone bring up a show stopper yet (i.e. senior staff or admins haven't chimed in with a big NO yet lol).
With that in mind, we can toss around ideas, but really, there would HAVE to be staff buy-in to this idea. There is no way to do this without getting their help and input. The rule of "don't touch it unless it yours" is a great one. It's the one thing that really bothers me about this maintenance idea. I know we all want to help, but I have reservations about anyone breaking that rule if they aren't under guidance/supervision from the mods/SS/Kryssy. That said, I'm still willing to toss around ideas here about it

How do we do this without driving staff insane?
Be an expert for an area/s. If you know the area really well, you have a good idea what's new, in progress, been recently griefed, etc. Being able to provide staff with names and timeframes makes their lives a little easier in the logs. It also lets you know immediately, "oh hey, that's new, let me leave a sign asking whose it is and letting them know they should plan on maintaining it".

How many blocks do we cover?
Just the yellow square? 150 blocks? I dunno. Someone pick a reasonable area.

How do we let players know about this new "maintenance area"?
Again, staff buy-in. We'd have to ask the Contribution Team to update the wiki, a news release, a pop up in game, etc.

We'd need a policies and procedure guide for the team/event.
Shell and Miner started touching on these with good ideas. Here's a few more.

• Have a Maintenance thread for each smp in addition to signs. That way we can let ppl know what we're doing, and they can inform us if they see something we didn't know about.

If we can find out an owner for a structure, contact via convo also. Something like -

"House at Wild East was found griefed on 1/1/10 (screenshot of structure). Griefing was reported to mods. If this is your structure or a structure you use, please contact us to let us know if you will be repairing it or tearing it down. Because it is in the maintenance zone, it will be repaired/torn down by our team on 2/1/10 if we don't hear anything otherwise from you." This example needs work, but it's starting point for conversation. Don't freak on me yet LOL.

• Determine player notice timeframes. I chose a month in the example above. I'm not sure on the derelict player vs non-derelict player. An active player should hopefully be easy to get a hold of in a month, and normally someone on a long hiatus leaves a status about that or they'll have already contacted Kryssy about not being made derelict. A long gone one is something that I think is above our pay grade and we should leave that up to Kryssy/SS/mods.
• Destroy Vs. Repair decisions. We need to come up with some reasonable guidelines around this.
• The maintenance team does not get to keep any materials from tear downs. They must be trashed or maybe go towards infrastructure (example - a road replacing that 1 wide dirt path over the ocean). I just know I don't want any personal gain from doing this. I don't want that to be a motivator either.

Thoughts?

I had this same situation, I was working on mines in smp6 (This is just one example) there was a house that was out of repair and destroyed. There were still locked chests....

So, I do participate in re-creating lands that were ravaged by griefers and age. I talked to moderators about this stating that if you find 1x pillars, creeper holes, or broken pathways. You can fix them if there is a sort of damage present or remove them. Now if there was a house, chests that are locked, just a structure in general. You need to get some background info of who built that structure and the status of his/her derelict status. If that player is over the derelict status, you can ask a senior staff to remove locked chests and continue either tearing down that building or fixing that building. That is how I dealt with it in the past and I don't expect much change unless I have been doing it wrong the whole time.

I am currently still in a reclaiming state underneath my pixel art which my friends and I are filling creeperholes, either fixing, adding or subtracting houses that were previously there (Houses that were Griefed of course), adding light (Because it is 24/7 nighttime under there), and adding buildings of our own to make it friendly.

Mind you these houses that either I or we take down are players that have been gone for more than a year. If the player has been online or not derelict, we either ask or leave it alone.

I like where this is going so far!

You just had to tempt fate and say that, didn't you?

(sorry, just messing here).

Ok, more seriously:

Agreed. I also think that it might help to apply some limitations as well; so a maximum amount of Frontier areas which a person can work on. Both for security reasons (same as you mention here) but also to protect people from themselves. You know, the classic: "I can take it all" only to end up getting buried in things to do.

Maybe limit this to people's home server (IMO they're bound to know that one, usually players spend most of their time there) and one other one, optionally (just an idea): the location which they visit most often.

Looking at my example I'm pretty familiar with several areas, 2 in specific, on SMP2 (home server). I'm also associated with an outpost on SMP4 but here the only Frontier outpost I'm familiar with is the one I use to go to/from said outpost.

Another thing: which players would qualify for this? Would we ask the staff to come up with thresholds (after all, they do have some experience on this part already when looking at the applications for staff as well as the contribution team)?

Even so, some input won't hurt. My take would be that a player should be active on the server for at least a few months (3 aka approx. 90 days for example) before they could be considered. They also need to be somewhat active on the forums; at least being able to PM other players. Younger players don't have to be ignored, but we might want older player(s) to vouch for them before they'd be considered.

Of course a players age doesn't give solid guarantees, but I think it might filter out less serious players. Which I think is important because we'd be balancing on a very thin line; the one between repairing and griefing.

Definitely agreed on the month period. That keeps things not too stressed, matches the derelict policy and should give plenty of time for people to respond. Of course there are players who may be gone for a bit longer (also think about permanent protection, or full time supporters) but even then I'm pretty sure that this could work.
Seems to me that a month will get us a good balance between not rushing things, but also keeping it doable.

The problem with the first is that each case is different. Definitely some guidelines, I'll get back to that one. But maybe I already got one: "When in doubt, don't touch it" (ok, that's a bit too easy, I know).

A very important detail, IMO, is if you can fully determine what something must have looked like. I remember a castle build on SMP2 (mostly made from stone & cobble) which had a very cool checkered wall which combined both cobble and obsidian. There were several obsidian parts missing, I had some on me so could repair some of that damage.

But another area used to have some (cobble) stairs, also a checkered floor but the damage was so extensive that it was nearly impossible to determine how the stairs were build. In those cases I guess the best you can do is focus on the outside of a building and leave the inside as-is. Optionally repairing the floor for easier access, but never overdoing things.

And of course always trying to respect existing designs.

As to point 2: fully agreed as well. Comparable to what I suggested in a previous message about donation of materials. The main idea there is obvious that if players are willing to donate for such a cause then I think there's less risk of them wanting to grief or steal.

Yeah, I really like where this is going so far. I'm going to try and look around more closely around the SMP2 Frontier this weekend to see if that gives me more inspiration regarding any guidelines.

An important question is how that areas are to be used in the future.
That can give clues about what to do and how, what to change and what to leave as is.

That areas around frontier spawn and outposts - how can they be used?
By new members? By old members?

1. Get to a (the) suitable nether portal to continue the travel through the nether. I think this is the most important current use. (I'd volunteer to create convenient nether portals at the outposts that don't have them yet. To do that, I probably need to temporary turn off some existing nether portals.)

2. Travel out over the overworld, mostly not further than 1000 blocks (because otherwise it is much better to use a path through the nether)

What else?

I've created an example portal on smp6 at /wild e (/frontier e).
Feel free to beautify it - replace cobble slabs I've used etc - just do not move the portal.
I've left one portal turned off - I'm 99% sure it was not in use any more because all ways from it that would be usable were blocked.
@bitemenow15 - check your portals please, they shouldn't be affected.

I think one month is not enough for the frontier.

Today I've visited the SMP6 "Quartz Express" station which i co-own and for which maintenance and beautifying permissions are granted to Cyberazaz101.
The station was heavily griefed - repairing now.
The last time I was there was surely more than 7 months ago.

Locked chests do not need to belong to the owners nor current users, so derelict status of any locked chest owner does not mean much. An owner of a locked chest might know who are the current owners and/or users of a structure, but they also might not know.

A policy where users are required to somehow mark or report the structures they own would be very helpful. Most of the structures I own and/or use are marked with signs.

my portal works fine, thanks for looking out

also i agree 1 month is simply not enough time, i often leave my area untouched for more then a month and im on all the time.

Did anyone give any further thought on this? The smp8 public wild utilities eat up almost 100% of my time on emc, but I think this was really worth pursuing.

Here's some more thoughts from me on making this a successful endeavor if we wanted to pursue it in an organized fashion. I know awesome people go out and just try to take care of it already when they can, but we've all seen that more TLC is needed than what's currently happening from that.

We need someone to be the forum manager and writer on this, and work with staff to write up a good set of policies and procedures that will of course need tweaking once people really start working on this. The concerns and questions we've all raised so far here on this thread will need answers.
We need a recruiter to find SMP team leaders who would then be responsible for forming their teams on each SMP and organizing what needs to be done where and when. The team leaders could keep the thread updated with planned activities, and what's been done when/where and by who. This could also be a rotating position. Someone doesn't have to sign up to be a team leader for life or anything. I've found with the public utilities that people burn out or have other projects or just need a break for awhile. That's why you see such a large number of different people who rotate on/off the public utilities.
We really need one person to take up the reward/burden of running this. It's not going to be me. I'm happy to help out, but I'm already swamped. Shell, you fit the bill also to take on this project, but I'm not sure if you want it or if you're swamped already also. I know some other people off the top of my head that could successfully do this, but I don't know if they'd want to or if they're available. We need a leader who is respected in the community and has organization and communication skills, and availability. EMC have a job posting thread? haha

Thoughts guys?

I could volunteer my outpost as 'adoptees' of the Smp5 public utilites, I believe some of us were already active in keeping them maintained in the first place. I would volunteer my time and probably some of the other members would want to be in this task force as well as our pet project.

Nice, thanks Petunia!
Any chance I can interest you in a job running this show for cleaning up the immediate areas around the Frontier spawns? You are actually one of the people that came to mind...
I think finding someone who both can and wants to run this whole thing is going to be the real challenge LOL.

I can take on the task for Smp5, on behalf of the entire outpost

its literally a full time job, in the small microcosm i maintain on 6 i get noob flooded like once a month, pillars. little dirt shacks. the whole 9 yards, and thats not even including any griefing

Yeah, I've given this much thought and I'd be happy to help out where I can but I don't think I'd manage to oversee the whole thing for all SMP's. But we can always start small, one step at a time, and see where this gets us.

Because first things first: there's one thing missing from this right now IMO: staff response. I'd seriously like to know what the staff's official opinion on this idea actually is. Therefor I guess the best thing to do is to ask them, so I'll just PM Krysyy later this evening and ask. After we got that out of the way we can concentrate on the next step, which might setting up the policies.

I can definitely help out like that, but in all fairness I'm not too eager to take on this job full time. First because of time constraints, but I'm also still trying to get the hang of actually organizing something properly in-game (and finishing it! ), which probably doesn't make me the best candidate here

I have read some of whats been posted on here (lots of large walls of text ) and one thing that has not been discussed is the effect of the Anti-Grief update on any of these procedures. Staff may already have solutions for this problem in that update, or that update could prevent this from happening. I love the idea, but as has been said before, staff input is really needed. Especially since they are the only ones that really know what is happening in the Anti-Grief update (we have some details, but not all of them).

Also, we may be able to influence the development of Anti-Grief to include some form of system that would make it easier to recognize derelict areas and such, if it doesn't already have that.

Anyway, this is just my 2 cents

Ok, step 1 is underway. I roughly summed up the thread for Krysyy and asked her if she would be open to the idea where us players would suggest a "frontier repair policy". Just to be perfectly clear here: I'm not asking her if she'd agree with the idea (we can't, we don't even have a set of rules yet), only if she'd be open to the idea of us setting up a policy and then discussing said policy with the staff.

However: I also asked her if she would tell us if staff doesn't like the whole thing. I think that's only fair, because one way or another we would be balancing between repairing & griefing.

Even so: that doesn't have to stop us from trying to set up a set of rules. I'm going to go over the whole thread tomorrow evening and see what ideas we have so far and sum them up. Then we might be able to discuss some open points we have left.

Another suggestion: once we managed to come up with a policy (might take a while) I'd suggest we try to ask the whole community what they think about it. I can imagine that there are plenty of players who don't look forward to read through yet another huge thread, so a new "policy poll" should be much easier for them to follow & to make up their mind about it.