PirateCraft has been running for over 6 years now, in that time we have learnt the best ways to run a medium sized Minecraft server is with constant activity.
One thing you learn quickly is having to constantly adapt and change things, one of the major aspects of running a Minecraft server is the entire chat system, you soon realize it’s not just chat, its the core to having a community communicate, without a community there is no Minecraft server.
From the most basic perspective you have to block annoyances from your core players from players that join just to cause trouble in chat, using alts to spam chat, swearing and insulting people, sadly anywhere online where people have an anonymous presence will attract bad behaviour, this can be curbed with ChatControl without needing to tweak much to get started.
Before ChatControl, our chat was chaos. After ChatControl, we were able to rein in this chaos into something manageable.
At PirateCraft we realised ChatControl is more than filtering swear words, it’s designed to allow custom rules based on events tailored to your server, we have re-made all of our RegEx checking as ChatControl allows you to design your own RegEx, we have certain words replaced with Pirate talk, we have a whole list of in-game quick Emoji (Like :fliptable:) and loads more unique changes for us.
Before ChatControl, our chat was chaos, people spamming, advertising in chat, posting links to questionable websites, we were able to rein in this chaos into something manageable, only allowing links to our website to be posted, stop people advertising all together, auto ban racist comments made. We have custom rules that trigger a message a message to the player writing only based on certain things they write, this can be used to alert users complaining of a bug you know about, or give them a quick how-to for a question that’s asked a lot, for an example I wrote a rule for when people ask “How do I get started” to send them a message with links to our getting started guide.
We also have /chat in game that shows all the Emoji for the chat system, you can show when people try and send me messages with /mail send GodsDead, it should send them a message in-game to contact me on discord, this is a good simple one. We also have used ChatControl for things like April fools, where we changed a ton of common words to really silly sentences!
Once you give people the right tools to communicate your entire server will benefit, we have staff chat go across all our servers, and certain events also get sent across all servers to staff only, this is very handy to always keep on top of moderation and running a server.
I couldn’t go back to not having ChatControl on PirateCraft, I would class it as one of my must have plugins for running a Minecraft server.