Wow, 2,000 is quite a big number. And since it's yet another of my milestones, I think it's a good thing to do something special, but instead of doing the usual story stuff, I think it's time to put this board to good use. Let's talk about something that I have always been passionate about. It's about Minecraft communities. Not just any community, but those whereby their developers write custom content.
Normally, someone gets the idea to start up a Minecraft community, and then hunts around for features. Bukkit made available several plugins in its repository so that owners could put features on their servers and have a nice functioning base for their community members. This is nice, because it means they don't have to do any coding themselves, they can just load in the work of someone else and have the community built quicker.
What about those people that don't just want to get plugins from a repository, yet want to go above and beyond that? These are the people I have a lot of respect for, because they put in the effort to make their communities their own, and that is an admirable trait. Why is it so admirable? Because it's about the time and effort. Putting in the time to make something truly elegant and exciting for your community.
Our ancestor community was much like us in the same way. They also had custom content, not merely slapped together code found from bukkit's repository. And that's another thing. Servers that end up using someone elses code don't really have unique qualities. Other servers will have the same kinds of things as well. In much the same way, these servers will have 25+ plugins, each adding to a certain aspect of the server.
There are other advantages to this approach. One of them is rather obvious to me. When it comes to updating to new Minecraft servers, we only need to update our plugin, and a few others that are used on the side, if updating requires updating them as well.
Innectis goes above and beyond this concept by not only having a plugin written from scratch, but by also writing custom code for the server we run on. This is primarily to adopt certain things which require code not currently supported by the respective authors of the server software. Having that much control over what goes into our community is a great feeling.
Allowing this much control has given us as plugin authors much more fluidity when it comes to providing rich experiences to our player base. It allows us to provide a suggestion board, allowing our community to help pitch ideas, and gives us a greater control than if we had gone the third-party plugin approach. This I am very grateful for.
