The first griefer on the server was Bieb. 10 minutes after I fired up the first server and began building the spawn I gave the address to Bieb and he griefed the spawn with TNT. I had to restart the map over.
When we first started our address was actually mc.thebieb.com and not mc.renmx.com - I did own the renmx.com domain at the time (and have done since about 2007) but I wasn't certain which community our Minecraft server would be attached to. Eventually it was set to mc.renmx.com
Our first game mode was Creative but back then there was no menu to spawn blocks from and we only gave /item to our "Master Crafters" which was a rank similar to todays Architects. Everyone else could only use one of about 16 kits which gave you wood, cobble, stone, bricks, dirt and so on. So even though it was Creative many players still had to craft what they needed to build.
The server was launched using hMod which was the precursor to the bukkit project. hMod was started and maintained by Hey0 a 15 yearold computer programmer who eventually became disillusioned with the Minecraft community constantly hounding him for updates and left. The bukkit project went from nothing to a workable copy in about 7 days after Hey0 announced his departure. We too switched within the first few days of Bukkit making our community one of the first to ever use Bukkit. It sucked.
Back when we used hMod we didn't have WorldEdit. Instead we used a plugin called Cuboid which did basically the same stuff but with different commands.
When our server first started, Minecarts didn't work and had the potential to crash the server which they did, regularly. Same goes for boats and many other entities. Furnaces did not work reliably and only a month before we started our server did Chests start working properly.
The first town created on our servers was founded by Tom. It was a small town with a central garden with houses facing towards the garden. Tom is also the longest lasting staff member. He actually had staff rank before Bieb.
When the server started we had to re-image the world every day for an online map. The map did not support panning or zooming it was just an image I would create and post. We later transitioned to a web based google map but that too had to be imaged every day manually and it took hours and hours. This is a far cry from the DynMap we currently enjoy however the original google map did have player positions after I coded it in. I even had to make the icons for the players to appear on the map. It was real old school.
Our first server when we launched in 2010 had 6GB of RAM. This was quickly upgraded to 24GB of RAM as the server soon out grew the amount of RAM we had. During this time we didn't have any kind of logblock and no reliable backup system so griefers ran amuck with no way to stop them, luckily the game was still so new back then that griefers were few and far between. It has all changed now with griefers being a daily occurrence.
When we launched our servers were whitelist only and the only way to get in was to reply in our thread on the official minecraft forums. Our thread reached quite a few pages before we switched to a Graylist model meaning you can connect but couldn't do anything until you signed up on our signup page. This was later changed again to a fully open model with the spawn maze on survival.
The current spawn maze on survival isn't our first. On our old survival map there was a hedge maze version of the spawn maze. It was much shorter and instead of asking you questions it had you perform tasks such as using craftbook bridges, gates and lifts. The new spawn maze is much nicer.
On our old survival map we didn't have warps or telepads. Instead we used Stargates which meant you had to build a gate and then from that you could dial another gate built by another player. These were very unreliable and often did not work. This is why we now use Telepads on survival which work every time.
These are just a few facts I can think of right now. Good thread
