We've been hard at work behind the scenes, trying to get this thing back up to play. Some brief notes:

1. We heard from the obsidian guys...about 6-7 times they said we'd have access within 20 minutes. Never happened. We hope to get that last backup out of there, but let's be honest...they're dead to us.
2. We have a 7 day trial of a new hosting provider, and are working on some setup stuff. We will have bukkit, but bukkit out of the box isn't what we need, it needs to be set up. We're working on getting a bukkit configuration together before unleashing the server to the masses.
3. We're also negotiating things to do about the old map restores, we'll poll everyone before doing anything.

Ever since we've been doing backups, the other mods and I have been occasionally downloading them for some extra backup protection. By leaving backups on the server, we protect against corruption of the files, but by downloading them we protect ourselves from issues like we're having now where the hosting company runs wild and we don't have the files. I'll be honest, I haven't been great about doing this regularly as it's a pretty manual process.

To some degree, it's a bit unfair that we have access to the map when other's don't; it allows us to look at it in a program like minutor and find things others wouldn't necessarily find. Also, if I get hit by a bus and I have all the backups, we're screwed. That's why I've put a link in the sidebar to the most recent downloaded backup.

I download a backup file and save it to the public folder of my Dropbox account, where it will stay linked to in the sidebar. Also, I'll be updating the date of the last backup so you know how old of a map you're looking at. The server has been offline since the 20th, and the most recent backup I have is the 17th, so if we have to move hosts, it looks like we'll lose 3 days of work.

Despite our recent issues with Obsidian Hosting, we had submitted a ticket to them almost a week ago to have bukkit activated in order to install some griefer protection. We wish to poll you all, the users, about which plugins you'd like to see installed.

There are 2 groups of plugins we're talking about: Essential server-management plugins which don't change the gameplay that much, and fun plugins like minecart mania that change the function of the game. We've split them into 2 separate polls.

Oh Mr. Goldstar, the mistake you made....

For the record, this joke makes much more sense if you have seen his skin:

The structure of the castle at New Gullonia is up...

Now all I need to do is hollow out the moat around it and the structure will be complete. Then...to re-build the outside in obsidian and sandstone.