Summary
- Due to restraining policies and hostile management, on December 2020 we have moved away from SpigotMC to BuiltByBit.
- After we left, our SpigotMC account was banned and censored for linking to BuiltBybit. To date, we are not allowed to communicate our migration with the buyers on the site.
- We’re continuing the development of ChatControl, Boss, CoreArena, Confiscate and Winter which you can find at mineacademy.org/plugins.
- If you bought these plugins on SpigotMC you are entitled for a free license transfer until December 31, 2023. Click here to migrate.
It’s been 3 years since we’ve left SpigotMC and consequently, our account has been banned.
Being one of the biggest publishers on SpigotMC, now banned and censored (try writing “MineAcademy” on SpigotMC.org)
The reason we left SpigotMC was not a single incident, but rather a cumulative way we felt we were treated since opening our SpigotMC account in 2013.
I decided to write this article as a means to clear up disinformation and explain our side of the story because every week for the last 3 years people are still coming to us regarding this.
Your Efforts Are Irrelevant
On December 2020, our plugin ChatControl was about to be rewritten.
I thought it’d be fair to ask a $9.99 upgrade fee considering many people purchased it as far back as 2015 and were still demanding of my time and support. (Note: After community feedback we later removed the upgrade fee altogether.)
After weeks of a dragged-out approval process, I received a very hostile response from Michael Dardis, known as md_5, the founder and owner of SpigotMC:
We’re Entitled To Control The Platform As We Wish
This was not the first time our resources were getting rejected.
A program called PunishControl one of my contractors posted on our behalf earlier that year also took months to get approved and was rejected on multiple occasions for the smallest of reasons. I now decided to move on to another platform.
In retaliation for leaving SpigotMC and promoting the new site, our account was banned overnight. The stated reason was advertising, which is understandable, but we were given no option to inform the buyers where to get continued access.
SpigotMC removed all mentions of the migration and made it look like I was an idiot and/or simply left people in the dark (SpigotMC has a habit of making people look like idiots, see below).
SpigotMC Issues A Statement “On Recent Events”
I so wrote an article addressing my long-term frustration against SpigotMC. It was a rushed decision and the article contained biased information for which I apologized to Michael for, and redacted it since.
The thumbnail for the post, was the actual ban reason substituted with a quote from SpigotMC founder, perhaps explaining his hostile nature to premium plugin authors on his site:
The next day, a swift counter-statement was issued by SpigotMC. Michael took this as an opportunity to discredit me and claim that the joke thumbnail was used as a real image.
The actual ban reason was stated in the article and in the comments section, but that was completely twisted against us in SpigotMC’s statement.
Furthermore, their statement claimed that multiple accounts were opened, framing us in a bad way. We did open a “kangarkodemo” account for testing purposes after getting approval from SpigotMC.
After this, SpigotMC did not only suspend our account. In a desperate attempt, they censored all of our site references.
Why You Should Move Away From SpigotMC
My decision to move away from SpigotMC on December 2020 was not based on a single event.
Our account on SpigotMC has been active since 2013, and below are some things I feel are compelling reasons for why you should too consider moving away from SpigotMC:
1. Hostile And Arrogant Management
In the 7 years of the platform I felt I was constantly being treated with arrogance and straight-up hostility every time we needed to contact support. In short, we were being treated like garbage.
A similar thing happened with Forge, one of the biggest Minecraft modding platforms. Due to poor attitude of its founder, his entire 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 pf his staff at SpigotMC:
It’s not only me who has noticed SpigotMC’s inappropriate treatment of its users.
2. 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: Official SpigotMC Rules
3. SpigotMC Allows Piracy & Won’t Ban Leakers
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, we respectfully disagree with their hands-off policy and silent agreement to the piracy issue.
4. SpigotMC Allows Refund Fraud Which Can Get Your PayPal Suspended
People have been abusing the PayPal dispute system knowing that SpigotMC takes no action and denies responsibility for handling transactions on their site.
Multiple people having their PayPal account suspended have never been properly addressed nor attempted to resolve the matter by SpigotMC.
“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:
5. SpigotMC Runs On Vulnerable Forum Software Abandoned Since 2019
SpigotMC runs on Xenforo 1, which has not been receiving security updates since 2019.
In fact, my own account got hacked once before I enabled 2fa authorization.
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”.
/That was in 2019, I was not able to find a more recent statement, please comment below with more up-to-date information./
What is the cost of putting thousands of accounts at risk?
6. SpigotMC Fails To Mitigate The Cyberbullying Of Minors
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.
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, including large ones such as MinecraftForum.
Closing Note
We have been banned for advertising MineAcademy and the competitor platform where we have moved. Any other forum would do the same as advertising competitor sites is not allowed.
I wrote this article not to blame SpigotMC for the ban, but to point at how we have been treated by SpigotMC for years and to provide our side to the story how we feel their management is treating their long-term contributors.
Look what happened to Forge in July 2023. At Forge, people have been tired of the lack of progress and the attitude of its founder, so they left and started their own project NeoForge.
Similarly, Spigot has been forked and Paper came to life, which is now 3X more popular than Spigot. The people behind Paper are not perfect, but they are hard working and innovative.
And unless some dramatic management changes will take place, SpigotMC will be remembered as the great Minecraft server software running in 2012-2018 on the iconic orange forum. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Regards,
-Matej
