Pandora Newsletter Issue #5

Hello all Pandorians,

Welcome to Issue 5 of the monthly Pandora newsletter. It has been once again another crazy month for ums and I do believe we are all slowly going insane (some of us are already there).


A gift to say Thank You
Before I get stuck in to the server news I would like to give a shout out to all you guys. I just love seeing you online enjoying the game, it did not help with the server being whitelisted, but you stuck by us and kept the server populated and a fun place to be.
Because of your loyalty and to celebrate the fact that Pandora has been online for 6 months I am giving away a minecraft gift code for a lucky person on the forums. You don’t have to do anything except reply to a thread in the forums and you will have a chance to win a minecraft account to give to your friend, family or just keep it for yourself and play with two players.

Commotion about Promotion
There were a number of promotions generated this month, this is because of the backlog we had of people who had applied for promotion, and I am sure they will all do a great job in protecting the server especially as whitelisting is now switched off. There are of course lots of people who also deserve a promotion but let me say that if you don’t apply we will not promote and when we do we are careful not to unbalance the server so can not have too many of one rank. If you are not of a higher rank this most of the time is not because we don’t think you deserve it but because you either have not applied or are on a very long list that will get promotion at some point (depending on the server userbase). The more users we get on the server the more players of a higher rank we can have, please continue to apply but please note it will be very unlikely you will get promoted until we have more users on the server.

We are like so 21st century
The server has a twitter account, woohoo we are so down with the kids. I put off creating an account but because of you guys requesting it over and over again I decided to give in and as soon as I did I can see why you wanted it. I can see it being a great tool for the server where I can give tweets on important server stuff and some not so important. I would like all to follow the twitter feed as I will be posting important things like, server crashed will be back in 5 mins, this way you will get up to the minute information on what is currently going on. I will also post other random things but all minecraft/server related. You can follow the server at @PandoraServer

Why didn’t you tell me?
Speaking of communication. We all try our best to make sure everyone on the server knows what is happening and how they can get involved. This is done by the forums, www.pandoramc.forumotion.co.uk – ,by using ventrilo IP - vent16.gamespeak.com
Port - 4366 Password - Pan , - server announcements, – email & Pandorian newsletters and now twitter. I am sorry to say that I am getting a little tired of replying to the same questions over and over again on the server when you have all these avenues to find the answer yourself. I will be taking a tougher stance in that for some questions you ask my answer will probably be limited to “visit the forums”. I don’t want to sound mean when I do this but please understand that we have so much work going on at the moment with the server that answering the same questions over and over again is very annoying. Let me very quickly highlight some questions that get asked in the hope you read this and not ask again.

Can I have op – No
Can I have creative – No
Can I have X ( X = any item) – No
Can I have Admin – No
Can I have permissions to do … – No

Wow chill out Pan I only asked
Let me explain a little more about what is happing with the server and why the answer to your questions will end up with the result No.
As I am very sure you are aware minecraft was upgraded to 1.2 because of this everything is broken. This is nothing new to us owners and server admins, we have been through it many times but there are some small differences with this update.
In previous server updates we have waited for bukkit to come out with a recommended build before we updated and generally by that time the plugins that the server used were updated and working correctly. This time round we decided to upgrade to a dev bukkit build, this way Pandorians can enjoy playing with their friends and enjoy the minecraft changes.
To coincide with this update the server has decided to generate a new world map and all owners, admins & volunteers are busy helping with creating a spawn point leaving not much time to help other players.
So when will the answers change to Yes?
Well obviously for some of those questions the answer will always be ‘No’ but what we are waiting for is for bukkit to release a recommended build. As soon as this happens we will install and update all our old plugins, everyone will have the same ranks as before, you will get to build on the new world map but still have access to the factions world, creative world, custom map, and the old world we had before.
So what do you do now?
On the map you currently spawn in, you can do anything (within reason, no griefing please) you want to do. We owners & admins are going to continue to be busy trying to get things set up for you but for the most part it is out of our hands and we just have to wait just for a bukkit recommended build to come out.

They did it again
Faction Season 2 is over, and the winners were Solaris. Congratulations jramos037, Rebel_Sniper, Danny8390, SIU_Seth, Vijaya & asclepias it was a great season and quite a title race between you and Scout. You guys better watch out as I think all faction teams will be gunning for you in Season 3.

Collins dictionary – Out Now in all good bookstores
In other news, and something more important then all the other stuff I have written, Pan has a new word. Pan’s dictionary currently consists of the words; hawt, baus, smidge (pleural (rs), ite.
It was pointed out to me, from a very helpful Pandorian, that I occasionally add an extra ‘t’ before typing ‘is’ or misspell ‘its’ by placing the t first. So without further ado’tis’ has made it into the official Pan dictionary, you can expect it to be all the rage with all the Pandorians doing it.

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Let me end this newsletter by saying thanks to Atty who worked very hard in fixing permissions for us this month. It’s a little sad in that all the work atty did is now undone because of the plugin not working but none the less Atty worked considerably hard, so much so, a special one off rank was awarded, (self awarded but will be kept) the rank of TechSupport.
Thanks buddy.


Get the Party started !
I hope all Pandorians will be online for the 6month Pandora celebrations running all weekend 9th 10th & 11th. Games, music, and cake all weekend long.

Smidgers,
PAN1C