Golden rule: use common sense.
No griefing and no stealing, there are no types of protections anywhere. For public chests, take reasonably and use common sense, don't just take everything out of it. For private chests, do not take anything out of their chest. For shop chests, do not take anything out unless you have the payment ready.
This isn't PVP. It's turned on anyway (you can hold organized PVP matches and such), but this is a community server, don't go around killing people for no reason. Use common sense when deciding to attack someone.
Ask someone for permission if you think building nearby their build may cause problems. Again, use common sense.
If you use public farms, leave a reasonable amount of animals/seeds/food/etc left for the next person. Rule of thumb is about as much as you started with. Again, use common sense.
Small client side mods like minimaps are allowed. However, no hack clients or other related mods are allowed. This means no mods that provide auto-fishing, x-ray, auto-build, flymods, so on.
No excessive amounts of entities within spawn chunks. This is to prevent any unnecessary lag. Entities would commonly be things like animals, monsters, and item frames. So within spawn chunks: no mob farms, no excessive numbers of animals, and no excessive numbers of item frames.
This requires two things which I'll go over below: A linked Discord account, and an open house.
To link your Discord account to your Minecraft account, try joining the Minecraft server, it'll ask you to send a code to @Minecraft#9922 . You can find this user at the very top of the members list on the Discord. It'll be the purple username with the rank "Our robot overlord". Just right click, click "Message", and type the 4 digit code in the DM chat and hit send.
Once that's done, you're ready to join during an open house. Read the next question for more info about that.
An open house is where we just turn off the whitelist, allowing anyone to join. Anyone we like and deem trustworthy enough gets added to the whitelist and can join at any point. This helps us enjoy the game more and worry about griefers less.
As of right now, we aren't getting much traffic so we aren't doing regularly scheduled open houses (else even a weekly one, most the time nobody would actually show up). Instead, ask us in the Discord #general chat about doing an open house for you. And please be patient while you wait for a response. We have jobs and other interests outside of just Minecraft.
We're currently not making that public. There are too many ways for it to be potentially abused. In addition, when asked, most members didn't think it should be revealed.
Location: Austin, Texas, United States
Advertised speeds: 1000Mbps down / 1000Mbps up / Unlimited bandwidth
Actual speed test: 8ms / 914Mbps down / 819Mbps up (as of Oct 21, 2020)
Typical observed speeds: 3-10ms / 750-950Mbps down / 600-850Mbps up
Intel Core i7-3770k
Patriot 2x8GB (16GB) DDR3 1600MHz
Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H
OS Drive: Samsung 860 EVO SSD, 500GB
Minecraft server drive: Microsoft Storage Spaces Tiered Mirror array (has 2 SSDs and various HDDs)
Most of the parts in this computer are old ones I took out of my main gaming computer when making upgrades. So these specs are a bit old, but they work fantastically for just a Minecraft server, especially one at this scale (Small playerbase, no mods, basic plugins). Plus I get to run it on my own hardware and save on hosting costs, in addition to having full control of all the software and hardware.
I never liked servers that begged players to vote, especially ones that reward the player some payout for it. I've always seen it as a disingenuous way to try and get to the top of server lists. The very idea of voting is that you're voluntarily doing it because you genuinely enjoy the server and want to vouch for it. Not because a server is telling you to do so or bribing you to do it. But unfortunately, servers and server lists nowadays are plagued in that way.
Now for the twist you're probably expecting me to say: Running a server now, I see why they do it. Lots of players look around for servers, and of course, you can find tons of servers, it's like finding hay in a haystack. Everyone and their grandmothers are hosting their own server nowadays. Because of this, there needs to be a way to make yourself known, to really stand out.
Unfortunately, the best way is by getting votes on the server listing sites. As messed up as the whole system is, that's the way it works. Because when you go on those sites, sure enough, the first thing you see is these massive servers with thousands of votes, and a lot of the traffic will end up going to them. It's not rocket surgery, it's just how it is.
So with this in mind, if you really like the server, especially if you want the server to stay active and getting new people, please vote as much as you can.
A copy of these are also kept in the Discord at the bottom of #info