Short version
In December 2020 my SpigotMC account “kangarko” was banned.
The stated reason was advertising.
I had announced the move of my plugins to BuiltByBit.
Linking to a competing commercial site violates SpigotMC’s rules and that part is uncontroversial.
What this article addresses is everything that happened after: edited resource descriptions, removed migration links, a counter-statement by SpigotMC management that misrepresented the move, and confused buyers still arriving at MineAcademy support more than five years later asking what happened.
Where to find the plugins today
We’re still active. ChatControl, Boss, CoreArena, Protect and Winter continue active development, see mineacademy.org/plugins.
Buyers who originally purchased on SpigotMC.org under the username “kangarko” were eligible for a free license transfer for 3 years after the incident.
What actually happened, in order
I opened my SpigotMC account kangarko in 2013.
In 2020, I spend about 6 months rewriting ChatControl. Similarly to plugins like mcMMO, I thought it’d be fair to ask a $9.99 upgrade fee considering people who purchased it as far back as 2015 were still demanding of my time and support.
I received a very hostile response from Michael Dardis, known as md_5, the founder and owner of SpigotMC:
After this, I decided to move to BuiltByBit and posted migration notices on each resource page. The notice contained a link to BuiltByBit.
The account was banned overnight. The resource descriptions were then edited by SpigotMC and the migration links were removed, leaving buyers no in-platform path to find the active versions of the plugins they had paid for.
The counter-statement and what it changed
After the ban I published an article describing what had happened.
SpigotMC’s founder issued a public counter-statement on the official forum thread.
That statement took a satirical thumbnail I had used in my article:
The quote from Michael, md_5 is from his reply in a thread where people kept asking for more payment methods than PayPal. I used it to illustrate what I considered the actual reason for the ban and the hostility:
The actual reason was “advertising” and it told in the article below the joke thumbnail.
The counter-response twisted the facts and made it seem like I misrepresented what has actually happened.
The same counter-statement implied wrongdoing in the existence of a “kangarkodemo” account, which I had opened previously for testing purposes with explicit prior consent from SpigotMC’s founder.
After the counter-statement was posted, mentions of “MineAcademy” and outbound links to the site were filtered or removed across SpigotMC.
SpigotMC confused even its own staff members
The combination of the ban, the edited resource pages, the removal of migration links and the counter-statement framing produced a fake story on the largest Minecraft plugin forum.
Even SpigotMC’s own staff members were not fully informed: in one public 2021 thread, a SpigotMC staff member raised an alleged-malware concern about ChatControl that turned out to be wrong; the same staff member later corrected the statement to “I found ChatControl to be a feature-filled plugin of the highest quality”, but the correction took roughly half a year to surface.
Source: https://www.spigotmc.org/threads/chatcontrol-red-vs-chatsentry.613540
Why I left SpigotMC
Hostile and arrogant management
For 7 years, I felt I was constantly being treated with arrogance and straight-up hostility every time we needed to contact support.
A similar thing happened with Forge, one of the biggest Minecraft modding platforms. Due to the attitude of its founder, his development team left him and created their own modding platform.
The following responses were later clarified to be a “joke”, but I still think it appropriately reflects the attitude of the founder and some of his staff at SpigotMC:
It’s not only me who has noticed SpigotMC’s inappropriate treatment of its users.
SpigotMC will not remove fake reviews
SpigotMC removed the ability to report false reviews and will not assist authors in mitigating false reviews, trolling and misinformation on their platform:
Source: https://www.spigotmc.org/wiki/spigot-rules
SpigotMC protects plugin piracy
SpigotMC bans anti-piracy in plugins preventing plugin authors from implementing basic protections in their plugins.
Plugin piracy is a problem for (small) authors that demotivates and discourages them from working on their own plugins.
SpigotMC staff will remove the mentions of a leak site and take no action even if you provide evidence of a specific user leaking your resources.
We understand that a lot of evidence can be manipulated by editing Java’s bytecode, however, I disagree with their hands-off policy and silent agreement to the piracy issue.
SpigotMC allows refund fraud
People have been abusing the PayPal dispute system knowing that SpigotMC takes no action and denies responsibility for handling transactions on their site.
“Do not contact us regarding this resource for any reason” states their official guidelines when attempting to purchase a premium resource. Another example of pretty much non-existent customer support:
SpigotMC runs on vulnerable Xenforo abandoned in 2019
SpigotMC runs on Xenforo 1, which has not been receiving security updates since 2019.
In fact, my own account got hacked once with our paypal account being changed.
And it was not due to a weak password, I have received a private message from SpigotMC’s staff regarding a security breach.
SpigotMC has no interest in migrating to Xenforo 2, with md_5 claiming “As much as I hate to say it, not for a very long time. The cost would be well over about $2,000 USD”.
If they are so cheap putting an entire platform at risk, that alone should tell you enough why they attacked us so much when we begun selling trainings commercially.
SpigotMC fails to mitigate cyberbullying
I wrote more about the hate campaign here.
Officially, SpigotMC has rules against harassment, but in reality, they are applied inconsistently.
We had been harassed in large public threads on at least two occasions, and they were given no attention by moderators for weeks before they were finally removed.
Users such as Lax have a long history of targeted harassment of forum members and are still allowed on the platform.
Users such as Michael (known as clrxbl) have organized targeted harassment against us for months and engaged in death wishes, inciting for DDoS and calling for hack attempts.
Most of the Minecraft community consists of minors. As a future parent, I don’t want to see my children being bullied while discussing their favorite game online.
While I recognize the large amount of SpigotMC visitors and that it’s impossible to police every corner of any community at all times, in the 7 years being active on SpigotMC, we have seen negligence for the trolling and bullying of us and many of SpigotMC users more than on any other Minecraft platform.
Closing note
I am not the victim of a ban. Linking to a competitor on a commercial forum is bannable and that is fair.
What I do contest is the editing of buyer-facing migration information, the framing of the counter-statement, and the filtering of “MineAcademy” mentions on the largest Minecraft plugin forum.
Those choices affected real buyers and the consequences are still continuing to this day.
If you’ve encountered any other claims about me or about MineAcademy during your research that aren’t addressed here, the longer-form response with full receipts is at mineacademy.org/kangarko-review.
— Matej Pacan
Founder, MineAcademy
