Adminium Blog

The whole time I was on bukkitdev the rules became more and more encroaching, reaching deeper and deeper into my project and the corresponding structure until eventually it was so much extra work to keep JSONAPI on bukkitdev that it simply wasn't worth it.

Slow, ineffective reviews

My main frustration with bukkitdev was their impossibly slow review times that accomplished nothing. I had multiple connections to external servers to test if ports were open as a convenience feature for server admins will submitting to bukkitdev for years before I was ever notified that I was not following the rules.

<rant> What is the point of having a review system that delays every single one of my releases for 5 days if you aren't even going to catch errors when they arise? I have dealt with Apple's arduous review process for years, but I don't mind it because once I pass the review I can feel confident that my app will only be pulled at my discretion from that point forward. </rant>

Making demands over my project structure that would slow development and stifle innovation

To add to the problems, the reviewers were demanding at the end that I ship a unified version of the plugin as opposed to different jars for each Minecraft version. I did not want to do this because JSONAPI has very tight dependancies on each version and simply loading different classes isn't an option like it is for many plugins. The reviewers were unwilling to listen to my pleas that this plugin cannot conform to that because it does things no other plugin does.

I enable HTTP and WebSocket communication over port 25565! That takes tight integration that class swapping simply doesn't cut. It is possible that I misunderstand the implementation of class swapping and maybe what I want to accomplish can be achieved via their methods, but they certainly made no efforts to help my understand.

No CI, "prioritized" CI

I could have lived with all of this if they just let me have my CI server to deliver the latest version of JSONAPI for all Minecraft versions. However, I couldn't simply have a link to a CI server with the standard "be warned! dragons be here!" warning. I had to have exact verbiage that exculpated bukkitdev of any blame if I ate their server or something. It was annoying but I lived with it.

Eventually, they changed their rule again:

CI links should not be prioritized to the top of the page.

Now I wasn't allowed to link to the CI server in a manner that would let anyone find it.

People would complain about bugs not being fixed when they were in fact fixed. I had a working build but I wasn't allowed to link to it on the CI server (too prioritized) or even the mention the CI server in the comments without their exact paragraph accompanying it. Since I would often post from my phone, I just ceased commenting all together because it felt everything I said would get my project temporarily suspended.

No "advertising" for Adminium

The straw that broke the camel's back is more like an anvil. They passed a policy on the forums and in bukkitdev that no one was allowed to advertise any paid products!

I whole reason JSONAPI even exists is for usage with Adminium. That is the main reason I maintain this project. I love building and designing APIs. I love liberating data and enabling awesome web apps and iOS apps. But without Adminium bringing in the money it does, I could never justify spending this much time improving and maintain JSONAPI.

My Adminium thread on the bukkit forums was deleted. I was forced to remove all references to Adminium from my JSONAPI post and bukkitdev post. My sales took a big hit. Most of my accumulated posts and likes were wiped out.

I no longer want anything to do with Bukkit.

History time

I first made JSONAPI for the predecessor to Bukkit: hMod. You can review the original thread in an archive of the hMod forums.

When the Bukkit project was first formed, I was invited (along with sk89q and others) to some planning IRC chats because they wanted to make sure our plugins (JSONAPI included) would make it to Bukkit and help them unset hMod. I was the 23rd member of the forums as evidenced by my profile URL on the Bukkit forums: http://forums.bukkit.org/members/alec-gorge.23/.

The Bukkit project has changed significantly since those early days.

I no longer want anything to do with Bukkit.

Epilogue

Ahoy there. We've gotten a bunch of emails asking if there were any changes to server configurations with version 3 since we've been posting about the new features which is something I want to take the time to quickly address.

Yes, configuration is going to change drastically with version 3.0

Yes, we built an automatic server migrator to do all the work for you.

:)

You may need to change the port to the minecraft join port or something really minor like that but the bulk of all the work will be done automatically when you connect Adminium 3.

Hazaa!

Quite a few people have gotten a hold of us and asked if we could push notifications for flagged words such as profanities. 

We’ve tried to give you guys a bunch of new free features (as well as much better stability) in Adminium 3, but sometimes we come across feature requests that are totally awesome but we can’t justify the time to develop it. Now, as we want Adminium to be as awesome as possible, not being able to ad something really cool makes us pretty sad. That’s why we’ve gone ahead and added this anyway, but we’ve made it a $1.99 in app purchase to help us offset the time and costs associated with building it.

In the chat notifications sections, you can add any word as a trigger. If someone says that word or a word that contains it, you'll get a push notification. It's as simple as that.

Check out the awesome screenshot:

We like to get feedback from you guys and in that process, we found out a lot of you use Adminium across multiple devices. We've come up with a system that syncs you servers across any device you use, whether yours or a friends!

We're calling this adminium accounts. You'll be prompted to sign up for one when you fist launch Adminium 3. It will sync your server list to the cloud and let you log in from any device with Adminium! Once you log in it downloads your sever list and you're good to go!

What happens when you want to replace a bunch of occurrences of the same word in a config file? We've all come to love find and replace commands in our favorite text editors...so why doesn't Adminium do this?

Well, now it does! 

We've implemented both find commands and replace commands. See the screenshot below :)

Oh hi there, it seems you've found our tumbr! As a reward...I'm going to chat about installing plugins for a little bit. Feel free to hang around and check out the other new features :)

So in Adminium 2, you can enable, disable and remove plugins from your server. That's really cool but it seems like something is missing...what about installing new ones?

We've tried to give you guys a bunch of new free features (as well as much better stability) in Adminium 3, but sometimes we come across feature requests that are totally awesome but we can't justify the time to develop it. Now, as we want Adminium to be as awesome as possible, not being able to ad something really cool makes us pretty sad. That's why we've gone ahead and added this anyway, but we've made it a $1.99 in app purchase to help us offset the time and costs associated with building it.

If you're so inclined, you can get the in app purchase and install plugins from bukkit dev on the fly! Just search for the plugin, select the version, and click the install button...adminium does the rest! Now combine that with the file editor and you can also do any set up for the new plugins right from your phone. Check it out:

I'm really excited about this and I hope you are too!

Yes, you read that right...you can create and save macros to use later in the console!

In the app settings page, you can create a new macro with any command you want! For our silly example, let's may the console say "Adminium is awesome".

We're:

going to go to settings

click add new saved command

type in say Adminium is awesome

hit save

Now we have that saved as a macro! To use it, all we have to do is:

go to the console

hit the macros button

click on saved commands

tap on the command you want to insert

There you go! Now when you start playing around with this you may also notice that after you click on macros you can click on online players. This brings up a list of all the players currently online. You can tap their name and it will be inserted in the console! No more trying to figure out how to spell players names!

Cheers, Kevin

PS check out the screenshots below!

Hi guys, here's a quick overview of granular permissions in the new Adminium!

One of the most common requests we were getting from all you awesome people out there was "what if my friend and I both run the server" or from some of the bigger servers out there "can our moderators use adminium?". We thought those were interesting questions and that we could build a really awesome feature to address those. 

In Adminium 3, we've built a whole permissions system!

You can make accounts for your moderators and players and control exactly what they have access to. There are almost 40 different permission nodes that you can give to different users.

Basically how it works is:

You create a group, let's call ours "partial_test" (I know that's not super creative but come on, it's getting late and instead of sleeping I'm sitting on my couch blogging for you guys. That should count for something).

Now, we'll assign permissions to partial_test. Keep in mind there are almost 40 different things you can turn on and off for a group so the customization you can do to these is incredible. We'll say partial_test can: view files, edit files, delete files, view chat, cannot speak in chat, view the console, and run console commands.

Let's say we have a friend Jon (and yes, Jon is actually a real person and he is a friend). Now, we'll make Jon part of the partial_test group. Now, Jon can view, add, edit and delete files and folders, view the chat, view the server console and run console commands. However, he cannot speak in chat!

We think this is pretty cool. You can make a group and put people in it for anyone you want to be able to connect to your server through Adminium!

Even better than that, you can create an account for them right from the app and we'll email them their login credentials along with instructions on how to connect! Bam, awesome just happened.

Cheers, Kevin

PS We'll post a tutorial for how to do this later but I've put a couple screenshots below for those of you over achievers who want to read ahead :)

Here is a brand new feature for the next version of Adminium!

See your RAM usage, Disk usage and current server tick rate and the effective lag at a glance!