ShadeCrest: A Gaming Community

Weekly updates, huh? That's just silly - how about a half an update every 6 months!
Seriously though, this post was long overdue at the beginning of 2017. These are from late September 2016 to early December 2016. Enjoy!

Summary:

• Survival - Tutorial reminders
• Survival - Mail bulletins
• Survival - Limited /tpa and /tphere
• Survival - Soulbound
• Survival - Pages in /mail
• Survival - Satchels 3.0 & 3.1

Survival - Tutorial reminders
The tutorial now reminds players if they sit on a command for too long. A simple but effective way to clear some confusion for new players taking the tutorial.

Survival - Mail bulletins
Mail has been improved! Along with supporting multiple pages (rather than spamming all messages on /mail list), we can now send important messages to all players via a bulletin!
This will be used to inform existing players of any changes we've made to the server, and appears in your inbox as from "ShadeCrest" (in...

Towny will have it's upkeep cost changed this Sunday. There's a 90% chance you will end up paying more for your town, so pay attention!

Changes:
With these changes, taxing town members is highly advised!

-edit- Servers online again!

We're moving to a new server host to A. cut costs a bit and B. hopefully resolve once and for all the issues with the server crashing as it has been over the last few months. Please be patient with us while we transition the server. We've been busy behind the scenes preparing the new one and we're trying to make the transition as smooth as possible, but as always there will be unexpected bumps along the way.

We'll be on Discord throughout the transition so if people have questions we'll be there. The website should still be online / available so nothing to worry about there. Other things to expect are some lag as we backup files, copy things like configs, and such (non world files), etc. Sorry about that. :-(

We are going to try to minimize downtime and shut down servers, move world files, then change DNS over to the new server with a seamless transition as possible. Unfortunately the "seamless" and DNS don't actually go hand in hand...

Another year has come to an end, thank you guys for sharing your time with us Despite the hardships, it's been a pleasure chatting with old members and meeting new friends.
When you get into the day-to-day grind, it's easy to lose track of where we came from, so let's take this opportunity to go over some of the major changes from 2016.

Minecraft versions:
We went though what felt like a record number of versions, including one that broke survival so badly we needed to grab a backup! But new versions are the driving force for minecraft's growth, so we welcome them and the players they bring.

1.9 - Combat update with end cities, elytra, and dual-wielding
1.9.4 - Many bug fixes and Netty based server blacklist
1.10 - Polar bears, Husks, Strays, and fancy nether blocks
1.10.2 - Bug fixes and (annoyingly) made farmland shorter, with glitchy results
1.11 - Exploration update: Illagers, offhand maps, cursed enchantments, shulker boxes, and llamas
1.11.2 - Iron nuggets and...

Survival and Creative have been updated to spigot 1.11.2! The lobby will be updated later so that old clients can still connect to see they need to update.

Yay!

For quite some time now, VIP donations have been drying up at least in part thanks to the changes Mojang made to their EULA. For quite some time now, the server has been paid largely completely out of pocket by imaxorz. The cost for hosting the server isn't cheap so let's try a little experiment.

Without any commitments, if you wanted to help keep ShadeCrest alive with a small monthly donation (like via Patreon or something) how much would you contribute? I just want to get an overall ballpark so we know the overall difference in what we have to come up.

Keep in mind if we do this via Patreon, any excess dollars we raise would likely go into actually having a marketing budget and advertising the server which overtime would grow the community, grow the number of people potentially contributing, and lessen the burden of individuals who might in the short term be willing to fund a somewhat larger share of the cost.

Edit: (Max)
Here are the figures for server costs....