Whitelisting is a really good feature in our Minecraft server and at the same time makes it just not desirable to play on. Players want to play the game and we start by getting the game running. As players connect things start happening and people are happy. But then comes along the troll and it always happens. The troll will grief, go on a murderous rampage, steal what they can hold in their inventory and log off, never to return, never to give back those hard earned items. At first it was a simple, learn to play and bury your goods, but client side cheats and hacks make everything underground visible. You try and play a clean game on the public server to attract many players to have a huge, gigantic adventure while making new friends along the way but can’t because of those “special individuals”.
This is where Whitelisting comes into play, to keep unwanted people, bots, malicious software, out of the server. Coming up with an easy way to be whitelisted can be a challenge within itself due to these “special individuals” that want to test the limits. The idea is to make it easy and not be a long drawn out process as things like rules, server details are touched on. Ours is setup where you join our Community Discord Server and fill out an application that states the rules you have to agree to then input your IGN for Java Minecraft. After one of us in the Staff approves the application, the applicant can then go play in the server.
This is great because now on the console you’ll see denied IGNs and IP’s that can be banned manually as these are now obvious threats. Observing the number of attempts to login can also help you in determining things like, was it just a probe or is there an actual attack being prepped to the server. The drawback is, while everyone whitelisted is happy in the server, normally their friends will want to join them but have to go through the process and is a turn off. Getting new people to join in can also be a turn off, especially if they are just joining the Community Discord Server for the first time and have no idea where anything is at, like the application form.
So Whitelisting is good and bad, unfortunately the Trolls that just don’t want to stop will determine the course of action. They might get their moments victory in having an action done, but they will most likely get to enjoy a player filled server any time soon.