Yet Another Minecraft Server

19/04/2013 - April 2013 recruitment of CSO's

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 20:37:59 +0000

YAMS is now over 2 years old and we are still going strong, it's great seeing the community flourish and grow.

However as I'm sure you are all aware, we don't always grow, sometimes we loose players. This happens for a multitude of reasons, that being their personal lives are busy, not agreeing with the way I run this community or because they got themselves banned.

We don't do enough self promoting as Id like but at the same time I don't like shameless self promotion. I know servers that go around spamming everywhere they can think off, I don't agree on this. We mostly rely on these forums and word of mouth. Server lists don't always work and when they do they attract the wrong kind of people, stealers, griefers, trolls etc...

I do want more players to join us and work harder on having more active players instead of players that come on and then go away for months at a time, we do so many great things on YAMS it’s just such a shame that so much of this is not seen by people out there.

Recently we had yet again been relying heavily on whitelist, normally because of a lack of staff on a certain times (that's not saying I want my current staff to have to be on 24/7, it's not fair on them) or because we have had trouble.

With this said I do routinely take whitelist off, but every time I do it seems like the staff suddenly disappear at no fault of their own (lunch, dinner time, going out etc). It seems whenever I take it off, I end up being the only member of staff on the server and have had to do multiple tours all at once, now I don't mind doing the tours one bit but as admin I have loads of other stuff to do to, do I give a tour to a new person of fix something that’s been annoying current players? Trying to balance it all out can be quite stressful at times, so I end up putting whitelist back on until more staff come back on.

Now most of YAMS is setup so if there is no staff on new players can still work things out (if they read all the signs) however I like the personal touch, it's not something you see at a lot of servers, someone greeting you and actually helping you around, though some people say things like "what don't you trust me why are you spying on/following me" its not that at all, its more to help them out so they know exactly what to do and wont get in trouble later.

Unfortunately however lot of players do eventual get themselves in trouble, this is mainly due to there not being enough follow up staff. Once they have left someone in Sandbox they should regularly keep checking up on this player over the next couple of days or more ensuring they are doing well and understand the approval process, even help them on their houses if need be.

So this should be happening but it doesn’t always happen as there's so many other things that need doing on YAMS too, not to mention the fact that people also like to play (I don't blame them) instead of feeling obligated they have to do yams work all the time.

Anyway I know I've said this many times before and I'm sure I'll say it again, but id like to get these things sorted and take whitelist off more, every day I see people join and get refused because of whitelist, we are in top 1-5 of various Minecraft Searches. Searches such as: Family friendly minecraft server, Family friendly minecraft servers, banned from minecraft and many more....

So why not just take whitelist off and try and get them to sign up to the forums? Well as I said above it’s the amount of people with authority we have on the server; we still have various time zones in which no member of staff is on! We have various protections in place but as I said earlier I like for new players to be shown around and explained everything when they join. This can be done by regular members if no member of staff is on but this doesn’t always happen or happens badly as they are missing the required training or don’t fully understand the rules themselves.

It's just a shame that when I do take whitelist off we end up putting it back on a lot because of griefers and such. You try and be nice by allowing people to come on your server and they treat you, your staff and the server badly – it’s not nice for anyone. Safe to say these kind of people are always dealt with. It's just such a shame that you give them a 15 minute tour only to see them banned an hour down the line.

Ok so enough rambling, it's time to recruit more staff so we can have whitelist off more often!

Here's a little information about what a Community Support Officer job entails:

1. Greet new players.
If you love to meet new people, you are proud to show them around this great server, help them find resources, give them building ideas, or just chat with them for company then you already have the most important skills.

2. Reinforce Server Rules.
Are you familiar with the server rules posted in Spawn Tower? Do you encourage players to read or re-read them when they don't seem to know/remember how to behave? Would you feel comfortable muting players who can't seem to control what their fingers type in public chat? Can you handle the pressure of putting someone in jail when they get caught breaking the rules? Are you willing to investigate the reason behind the behaviour and give them a second chance? Do you set a good example for others by just being you?

3. Report bannable offences to Mods/Admins.
Occasionally there are times on the server when all the Mods/Admins are offline for a moment. As a CSO, it is important to document griefing by taking screenshots of the damage or the playerlist of people online at the time. Do you mind taking a little personal time to contain/clean up griefed areas? Do you feel comfortable posting in the forums, something along the lines of “I saw so and-so do such and such today and here are some screenshots of the damage along with locations."

4. Enjoy knowing that you are part of the reason YAMS is the best place to spend your Minecraft time!
Think about what you like most about YAMS and how to keep it being a place you visit to get a good dose of community spirit. We have such diversity here with people from many ages, interests, and countries. We might each have our differences but the best thing about all of us is that we have so much in common. We just have to get to know each other to find out what those common interests are and to introduce new ideas to share. That's what community is about, so if you would like to support the YAMS community, apply to be a trainee CSO.

5. Acceptable to job role change.
Understand that from time to time you job role may change and you may be asked to help out on other things that are totally unrelated to what you normally do but that give a benefit towards the community. You may also get the opportunity to be in charge of a public building or specific Job.

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To apply, you must be registered on the forums in order to reply to this post (keeps it open and fair). Please give a brief summary of why you think you would be right for the job and what you can offer that others cant. Take a moment to look back over previous applications (January 2013, August 2012, April 2012, October 2011, June 2011, April 2011) if you need ideas of what to say but please be original and bare in mind that a lots changed since them applications (don't just copy and paste we will know).

Also it doesn't matter if you post now, or wait until someone else posts, your post should be your words not someone else's and anyway your post is not the only part we base your application on, we will also base it on things such as your previous forum activity, severity of past crimes and how much time you have spent in game and when you are on are you helping the community.

We want to know which assets you will bring to the staff team. Why you and not that other person?

Good Luck!

Closing Date: 1 week from date/time of post.
Amount of positions available: undisclosed.

EDIT: This topic is for applicants to post their applications only. Please do not post or like other peoples posts, thanks.

03/04/2013 - Server maintenance

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:32:24 +0000

Just so you are aware yams is currently offline due to the following (quote from host):

We are taking the following machines down for immediate maintenance:

lon057, lon058 and lon059

All Servers on these machines will be offline until the maintenance is completed. Which will be within the next hour and a half.

We apologise for the inconvenience and will update this post accordingly with any new information.

I'll let you know as soon as we are up, unless someone else lets us know first!

09/03/2012 - YAMS and Minecraft 1.5

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 11:51:12 +0000

Minecraft 1.5 is out! Ok I'm just joking... it's not fully out yet, that comes out next week... though the pre-release is out!

May I remind you that as before with previous updates, we cant update the server to Minecraft 1.5 straight away for the simple fact that we have to wait until Bukkit / CraftBukkit and various plugins have updated themselves to the latest version of Minecraft, without these plugins we could not guarantee the smooth running of YAMS. There is currently no statement from Bukkit concerning Minecraft 1.5, however as soon as they post one, if they do, I'll let you know.

Minecraft 1.5 is not a backwards compatible update, meaning if you update to 1.5 you will not be able to connect to a 1.4.7 server (what we are currently on).

I suggest you do not update to Minecraft 1.5 straight away until we have updated to 1.5. However should you wish to go and play 1.5 without us then please make a copy of your bin folder or the minecraft.jar file so you can come back and play on YAMS if you get bored!

It is important you do this before you update if you wish to come back to YAMS before we update.

Bin folder located at the following locations ( “~” = username):

Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003: C:\Documents and Settings\~\Application Data\.minecraft
Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and R2: C:\Users\~\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft
Linux: /home/~/.minecraft
Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft

You can also find this location by going to Texture Packs (on the main menu) -> Open Texture pack folder -> Then going up a level till you see the bin folder. Or for example on windows you could type in your explorer bar %appdata%/.minecraft

If you forget to do take a copy of you bin file etc, you will need to use a program like McNostalgia to come back, however bear in mind this takes a while to update.

As always I will keep you updated on the latest news of updating, if you have any concerns relating to YAMS and Minecraft 1.5 please feel free to ask in here and I'm sure someone will be able to answer you. Though some questions we wont know the answer too till it happens!

As explained in the past, please remember things may take a little while to be fully sorted once we do update.

Thank you,
Darren and the rest of the YAMS Staff.

01/02/2013 - YAMS 2nd World 1st Year Anniversary

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:39:28 +0000

What a mouthful of a topic... let me explain....

On the 18th of February of 2013 we will have been living in our current world for 1 whole year, before that we lived in another world which is sometimes called YAMS v1, we journeyed to the world we live in now on The Ark which you can find in the north east ocean.

I’d like to invite you all to celebrate our achievements throughout the past year in this world, not by revisiting the old world as this has been done before, but instead by celebrating what we have now in our current world. Though there will be some off world explorations....

So from now till Monday the 18th be on the lookout for some upcoming events that will be posted in the forums.

Thank you,
Darren

23/01/2013 - Chairs come to YAMS!

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 18:39:51 +0000

A year and a half ago there was this idea of using a plugin that allowed you to sit on chairs (well stairs). I really liked this idea however there were quite a few bugs with it, one being that while you were sat down no one else could see you!

Today I would like to resurrect that idea by installing a chairs plugin that actually works!

The only bug I’ve noticed is that it takes a little while for the plugin to work out you’re coming of the chair if you gently move off it you will still be sitting down even though you are 1 block off, but that’s no real big issue unless people start to be silly and force be to remove it.

Anyway to create a chair:

Create a 1 - 3 wide set of stairs (any type) with or without signs/item frames for arm rests.

To take a seat on your new or even existing chair:

Stand 1 - 2 blocks away (takes some getting used too) and hold down your sneak/crouch key (probably left shift) and right click on the stairs. You will then be told you are sititng down. I decided to make it that you have to crouch so it’s less likely you end up sitting on chairs when you wanted to place a block instead.

To stand up from a chair:

Right click on the chair.
Destroy the chair.
Move away from the chair.

You cannot sit in an already occupied chair!

I shall review this plugin and how you interact with it for the next few days/weeks to come, if it causes too much of an issue for people, maybe trying to place blocks and you keep sitting etc... we may end up removing it. But for now its here to stay!

Please let others know about this, spread the word and also don't forget to leave feedback below.

Enjoy!

09/01/2013 - YAMS 2nd Year Anniversary

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 12:17:09 +0000

Today the 9th of January 2013, YAMS is officially 2 years old - wow!

I have interesting things to tell you... but first I'd like to tell you somewhat the same story from last year about about how I started playing Minecraft and how YAMS was born, as we have new players who may not have seen that post.

A brief story of YAMS

In October 2010 I was watching my brother play Minecraft Classic and Alpha round my house and it looked quite interesting, something we could both play together. I’d always wanted to play a sandbox game where I could build anything. So on the 9th of October 2010 I purchased the account “darrenstraight” and started playing Minecraft properly with my brother on a home server, we built quite a few maps together while he was over at mine, it was very fun, I remember building my first minecraft track that went on for ages cutting through the land and water.

Between November and December 2010 I started looking for various servers I could join, servers came and servers disappeared, it was hard times in the minecraft server world. I eventually came across one I quite enjoyed however it annoyed me that they kept changing the spawn point every time the current spawn town got griefed, so instead of trying to fix the town they just moved on to another part of the map and built a new town, this meant I was doing a lot of walking between my old house and new house if I died. However I managed to shorten the time it took by building a connecting tunnel between my houses, however people of course bumped into them from time to time and ended up at my house but only if they took the correct secret path! Eventually I gave up on this server because of these issues and though my memories of it are slowly fading away I still remember the good times.

One server I found in December 2010 was called Something Super Awesome, it was fairly well setup so I was hoping this might be the one; I read the rules and found a place to build. I went about meeting new people and such however it was not meant to be, as I was banned without explanation or reason. I tried contacting them but no luck so knowing my blog can get good traffic I decided to make a blog post on them to attract their attention – it worked! Better than expected actually, if you loaded up Google and searched using phrases such as “banned from minecraft server” my blog post was top. So I certainly grabbed their attention. However I was not unbanned and to be honest I didn’t really care if I was they had already shown what type of server they were and I didn’t want to be a part of it.

In January 2011 I decided it was time to put a plan into action, I was tired of finding servers that kept resetting the map every week, appeared and disappeared or were just disrespectful. I knew there was an increase of Minecraft servers out there now, but I thought to myself if they can do it so can I, maybe even better especially with my IT and leadership/management expertise.

On Monday the 9th of January 2011, 3 months after first having purchased my minecrfat premium account, I purchased a basic Minecraft 8 Player Slot server running hMod, it was what we had before bukkit. Take that Something Super Awesome I thought!

I gave myself a deadline of the 14th of January 2011, by which point I had hoped to have everything setup and ready with the help of my brother "Brainsss". However sods law that around this time I was having internet connection problems and then Minecraft Beta 1.2 was released! It seemed as this project was doomed to fail! I didn’t however let any of this hinder my spirit so I invited those that wanted to join to request so in my blog post comments so I could send them the ip address and at least get some sort of player base started.

On the 21st of January 2011 the server ip was still not publically known and unfortunately "Brainsss" was also having internet access issues preventing him from helping out, so I decided to get some pictures out there on a blog post hoping to get some attention from people to come and help before it went public. It worked, I received two comments one being "TheTubbe" who was our first ever member!

On the 26th of January 2011, Yet Another Minecraft Server better known as YAMS went public, it didn’t have much at first, just a very basic cobblestone town but that was the idea of it, right from the start the number 1 rule was always be a part of the community so I hoped people would get involved in expanding the town.

On the 9th of February 2011 YAMS had a total of 50 users and from a basic cobblestone town we had grown into a nice little community, on the 12th of February 2011 I decided to put what I had learnt from past communities I had managed into action by setting up the forums, it proved a success amongst members as it gave them somewhere to discuss how we should progress with YAMS.

Things from then onwards started to get busy on YAMS, our little 8 player server with 500MB of RAM was maxed out every day/night. So on the 25th March 2011 I decided it was time to upgrade and we upgraded to a 12 player slot server with 1024MB RAM, this helped a lot and allowed the community to grow and by June 2011 we had 1100 Players ever join YAMS, of course there was a fair share of bans just as there is unfortunately still today.

On the 6th of June 2011 we appointed our first CSO and also had another server upgrade, this time to what we have now which is a 24 player slot server with 2048MB Ram, not everyone was happy about this and some felt it was taking away the little community we had, however I don’t regret the decision to upgrade we are still going strong as a community and them extra player slots along with the extra processor allocation and RAM has helped us be able to play around with plugins more for events, before we couldn’t do this without putting a strain on the server.

On the 27th of August 2011 I announced that big changes were coming to YAMS as towns were going to now be more restructured with town moderators and a continuation of using more plots instead of live anywhere you like. 6 months before this I hadn’t expected that we would have this many people, so these changes while not all welcomed were necessary in order to keep YAMS tidy instead of turning into another dead end server filled with random mess everywhere, which was staring to happen in some areas as we didn’t know if players were coming back or not. I also knew this was a chance to see if this would work for future plans I had.

On the 9th of October 2011 a test build area was opened, I still wanted to allow player to be creative as I knew we had restricted them in towns somewhat now. It was wasn’t hugely successful however due to its location being quite far out and the fact that a lot of players didn’t want to use their own materials, along with the fee you had to pay, though this was shortly removed. The test build world we have today accomplishes what back then I couldn’t.

Shortly after this on the 18th of November 2011 YAMS had it's first mining world. Before this people could mine anywhere in the normal world, however it wasnt long before people kept hitting peoples basements and messing up all the YAMS terrain and there were also the issue of not having new ores, this problem was solved by creating a section that I could regenerate time and time again and people could only mine there. This worked well for some but was time consuming for me and wasnt really that fun to mine it. This is why the mining world was born.

Now that we could have multiple worlds, we started having more fun events, castaways, halloween, christmas and lots of others!

On the 9th of December 2011 it was time to announce to the members of YAMS the next big change for YAMS, I had been informing members that a bigger change was coming for some time. The change was a new main world, it was time to say goodbye to our current world and start a fresh world with everything setup much better for new and current players. Of course there were a lot of people who were very sad because of this, but it's something that needed to happen as you can read yourself from the post I link to above, our current world was falling apart.

It wasnt all sad though, a lot of fun was had building The Ark and filling it with items for the new world. Every player was allowed to take 2 double chests full of items to the new world. Deciding what to take was interesting. You can find more info about The Ark at this post here.

Also we had a chance to say one big goodbye for the old world as in January 2012 we celebrated YAMS 1st Anniversary in style, as we time travelled through time seeing YAMS at different stages throughout the past year. It went on for a bit longer than expected but was certainly a very enjoyable experience and even had a little twist to it at the end in which the whole of water around spawn was lava and dirt was netherack! Not to mention other things… but I’ll let you read the post!

On the 18th of February 2012 we finally moved to the new world, the world you build your house in today. It was a fun and interesting experience especially as every single member had to go through sandbox including myself and all staff, a lot of us had never gone through sandbox before, the sandbox process was setup quite a while back in the old world but we still had loyal members who had been here before that.

On the 13th of September, nearly 7 months after having moved to the new world, it was time to give the community another chance at remembering where we had come from. The YAMS Adventure back in time event happened, we visted the old world as it was the day we moved.

On the 6th of October nearly a year after the initial attempt at creating a test build area, I gave it a second shot, this time as separate world with extra "features"… In my opinion this has proved a success, of course you have to find the portal to it, which is a problem for some people but if you read the posts, such as the main one about it and the YAMS Server info post, you'll soon find it, it's really not that hard. But hey here's another clue for you.... Did you know it takes just under a minute to walk to the entrance from the bottom of spawn tower but it's not as a nice of a walk as walking round the outskirts of spawn, it only takes 6 minutes and 15 seconds.

So now 2 years on since YAMS was first started, we have now had over 3000 players join us and while we have lost many good people along the way, both for being banned (we try not to invoice bans but sometimes they leave us no choice) and leaving on their own accord (time to move on), we have gained lots of new interesting, fun and exciting people too. I believe YAMS is what you the YAMS Community make it to be, you will get as much back from YAMS and the community as you put in, if not more!

YAMS the dictatorship

Something that sometimes gets brought up by the community is how we can be too restrictive on building permissions; well yes we are certainly are more restrictive than what we used to be, but for good cause. Before you could pretty much build anywhere but that was when we had a very small community.

I stopped the build where ever fashion very early on to some extent as people did just that, they started building all over the place in no orderly fashion and not as a community as I had hoped, I decided that Id approve peoples locations on an individually basis around landmarks/big builds, this worked well to some degree but was very time consuming.

So sandbox was invented along with town plots, this freed up more of my time letting me spend more time with my community and plan events and such. I just wish more people would post in the town topic forums with what they want to see in each town and even get involved in their town projects more, or even help out in other town projects for that matter; maybe you could all make that your YAMS New Year resolutions?

Anyway I bring this up as recently I was told as I have been in the past that YAMS is a dictatorship, this is quite upsetting as I truly believe I do the best possible for YAMS to balance an orderly server while still providing some freedom, I don’t want us to just be like other servers out there where everything’s a mess.

There’s plenty of projects out there you can help out on, I make sure of this as I know you are somewhat restricted with your town houses, so if there’s anything you want to build in a town you only need to get it approved by a town mod (posting in the forum topic) and out of town projects by myself in the community build section.

Sure I don’t always approve everything but I do take everything into consideration and point you in the right direction if I thing there’s something else you could help out on, I also combine peoples various ideas into projects.

So to those that think YAMS sucks or is a dictatorship, maybe you should investigate what we have first and fully understand how we run things before making a judgement, whats interesting though is how many people get banned then regret doing what they did and try and plead their case to come back saying they haven't found another server out there like YAMS with a community.

The future

I could go on forever there’s so much more to say… but how about we celebrate instead and look towards the future of YAMS.

The celebrations

I would like to invite you all to celebrate 2 years of YAMS with me, this Saturday the 12th of January 2012 at 4:00pm GMT / 11:00am EST / 10:00am CST / 8:00am PST (time zone converter link here) for a very special community event.

If you plan on attending this event please tell us in the comments below so we can get some idea of how many people are turning up and who.

But hey you don't have to wait till the weekend to celebrate, why not celebrate now? Create your own celebrations with the community? It doesn't have to be something complicated, it could just be: Treasure hunts, boat/running races, capture the flag, pvp and spleef games, hide and seek and whatever else you can come up with! If you need any help, just ask!

More details about the main event will be revealed on the day but for now why not take a look at over 2623 screenshots of yams, taken by me over the past 2 years (see this link here) and discuss the past 2 years of YAMS in the comments below.

Thank you for being a part of the YAMS Community.

P.S. Each town will be receiving a present from me this afternoon, you will have to find it (wont be hard), but please don't ruin the surprise by opening/touching it, there will be instructions for your town moderator on what to do with it, they should follow the instructions with community members present and share whats inside with their towns community how they best decide, could be fair sharing or made into a game or anything really.

05/01/2013 - January 2013 recruitment of CSO's

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 15:02:32 +0000

Next week YAMS will be 2 years old, our community has been steadily growing with new members since day 1. However we dont always grow, sometimes we loose players, this happens for a multitude of reasons, that being their personal lives are busy, not agreeing with the way I run this community or because they got themselves banned.

I beileve it's time that we started promoting YAMS more again and work on having more active players instead of players that come on and then go away for months at a time, we do great things at YAMS it’s just such a shame that so much of this is not seen by people out there.

Recently we have yet again been relying heavily on whitelist, normally because of a lack of staff on (thats not saying I want my current staff to have to be on 24/7, it's not fair on them) or becuase we have had trouble.

With this said I do routinely take whitelist off, but every time I do it seems like the staff suddenly disappear at no fault of their own (lunch, dinner time, going out etc). It seems whenever I take it off, I end up being the only member of staff on the server and have had to do multiple tours all at once, now I dont mind doing the tours one bit but as admin I have loads of other stuff to do to, do I give a tour to a new person of fix a bug that’s been annoying current players? Trying to balance it all out can be quite stressful at times, so I end up putting whitelist back on until more staff come back on.

Now most of YAMS is setup so if there is no staff on new players can still work things out (if they read all the signs) however I like the personal touch, it's not something you see at a lot of servers, someone greeting you and actualy helping you around, though some people say things like "what dont you trust me why are you spying on/following me" its not that at all, its more to help them out so they know exactly what to do and wont get in trouble later.

Though a lot of players do eventual get themselves in trouble, this is mainly due to there not being enough follow up from CSO's. Once they have left someone in Sandbox they should regularly keep checking up on this player over the next couple of days or more ensuring they are doing well and understand the approval process, even help them on their houses if need be.

So this should be happening but it doesn’t always happen as theres so many other things that need doing on YAMS too, not to mention the fact that people also like to play (I dont blame them) instead of feeling obligated they have to do yams work all the time.

Anyway id like to get these things sorted and take whitelist off more, every day I see people join and get refused becuase of whitelist, we are in top 1-5 of various Minecraft Searches. Searches such as: Family friendly minecraft server, Family friendly minecraft servers, banned from minecraft and many more....

So why not just take whitelist off and try and get them to sign up to the forums? Well as i said above it’s the amount of people with authority we have on the server; we still have various time zones in which no member of staff is on! We have of course various protections in place but as I said earlier I like for new players to be shown around and explained everything when they join. Of course this can be done by regular members if no member of staff is on but this doesn’t always happen or happens badly as they are missing the required training or don’t fully understand the rules themselves.

It's just a shame that when I do take whitelist off we end up putting it back on a lot because of griefers and such. You try and be nice by allowing people to come on your server and they treat you, your staff and the server badly – it’s not nice for anyone. Safe to say these kind of people are always dealt with. It's just a shame you give them a 15 minute tour only to see them banned an hour down the line.

Ok so enough rambling, it's time to recruit more staff so we can have whitelist off more often!

Here's a little information about what a Community Support Officer job entails:

1. Greet new players.
If you love to meet new people, you are proud to show them around this great server, help them find resources, give them building ideas, or just chat with them for company then you already have the most important skills.

2. Reinforce Server Rules.
Are you familiar with the server rules posted in Spawn Tower? Do you encourage players to read or re-read them when they don't seem to know/remember how to behave? Would you feel comfortable muting players who can't seem to control what their fingers type in public chat? Can you handle the pressure of putting someone in jail when they get caught breaking the rules? Are you willing to investigate the reason behind the behavior and give them a second chance? Do you set a good example for others by just being you?

3. Report bannable offences to Mods/Admins.
Occasionally there are times on the server when all the Mods/Admins are offline for a moment. As a CSO, it is important to document griefing by taking screenshots of the damage or the playerlist of people online at the time. Do you mind taking a little personal time to contain/clean up griefed areas? Do you feel comfortable posting in the forums, something along the lines of “I saw so and-so do such and such today and here are some screenshots of the damage along with locations."

4. Enjoy knowing that you are part of the reason YAMS is the best place to spend your Minecraft time!
Think about what you like most about YAMS and how to keep it being a place you visit to get a good dose of community spirit. We have such diversity here with people from many ages, interests, and countries. We might each have our differences but the best thing about all of us is that we have so much in common. We just have to get to know each other to find out what those common interests are and to introduce new ideas to share. That's what community is about, so if you would like to support the YAMS community, apply to be a trainee CSO.

5. Acceptable to job role change.
Understand that from time to time you job role may change and you may be asked to help out on other things that are totally unrelated to what you normally do but that give a benefit towards the community. You may also get the opportunity to be in charge of a public building or specific Job.

To apply, you must be registered on the forums in order to reply to this post (keeps it open and fair). Please give a brief summary of why you think you would be right for the job and what you can offer that others cant. Take a moment to look back over previous applications (here, here, here, here and an older one here) if you need ideas of what to say but please be original and bare in mind that a lots changed since them applications (dont just copy and paste we will know).

Also it doesnt matter if you post now, or wait untill someone else posts, your post should be your words not someone elses and anyway your post is not the only part we base your application on, we will also base it on things such as your previous forum activity, severity of past crimes and how much time of course you have spent in game and when you are, are you helping the community.

We want to know which assets you will bring to the staff team. Why you and not that other person?

Good Luck!

Closing Date: 1 week from date/time of post.
Amount of positions available: undisclosed.

01/01/2012 - Happy New Year Everyone for 2013

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Happy new year everyone for 2013.

I wish you all the best for 2013 and hope you accomplish everything you want to in life, thank you to everyone that has supported me both in and out of YAMS. I couldn't have done it without you the community, keep that support coming!

Bring on 2013!

P.S. Don't forget YAMS will be 2 years old soon, so feel free to post anything you want to see happen in the new year below!

EDIT: Merged with namscupcake post below. No point in having 2 posts!

20/12/2012 - YAMS and Minecraft 1.4.6

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 12:26:22 +0000

Minecraft 1.4.6 is out!

Quite a few bug fixes and changes: http://www.minecraft...n_history#1.4.6

May I remind you that as before with previous updates, we cant update the server to Minecraft 1.4.6 straight away for the simple fact that we have to wait until Bukkit / CraftBukkit and various plugins have updated themselves to the latest version of Minecraft, without these plugins we could not guarantee the smooth running of YAMS. There is currently no statement from Bukkit concerning Minecraft 1.4.6, however as soon as they post one, if they do, I'll let you know.

I'm also pretty sure this is not a backwards compatible update, meaning if you update to 1.4.6 you will not be able to connect to a 1.4.2 server (what we are currently on).

I suggest you do not update to Minecraft 1.4.6 straight away until we have confirmation. However should you wish to go and play 1.4.6 without us then please make a copy of your bin folder or the minecraft.jar file so you can come back and play on YAMS if you get bored!

It is important you do this before you update if you wish to come back to YAMS before we update.

Bin folder located at the following locations ( “~” = username):

Windows 2000, XP, and Server 2003: C:\Documents and Settings\~\Application Data\.minecraft
Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and R2: C:\Users\~\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft
Linux: /home/~/.minecraft
Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/minecraft

You can also find this location by going to Texture Packs (on the main menu) -> Open Texture pack folder -> Then going up a level till you see the bin folder. Or for example on windows you could type in your explorer bar %appdata%/.minecraft

If you forget to do take a copy of you bin file etc, you will need to use a program like McNostalgia to come back, however bear in mind this takes a while to update.

As always I will keep you updated on the latest news of updating, if you have any concerns relating to YAMS and Minecraft 1.4.6 please feel free to ask in here and I'm sure someone will be able to answer you. Though some questions we wont know the answer too till it happens!

I'm hoping it wont take as long this time to get updated as it's just bug fixes, as before please remember things may take a little while to be fully sorted.

Thank you,
Darren and the rest of the YAMS Staff.

07/12/2012 - Server maintenance

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 17:07:53 +0000

Just so you are aware, YAMS will be down tomorrow the 8th of December 2012 for a little bit, here's what our host has to say:

We will be carrying out important maintenance on the machines listed above tomorrow. This maintenance will mean taking the machines offline for a period of no more than 1.5 hours.

Begins: 08/12/12 at 11am GMT
Finishes: 08/12/12 at 12.30pm GMT

Thank you in advance for your patience.

Thanks,
Darren