Retrospective & Future Plans
MC-Market is in a very different place to where we were only a few years and even months ago. Today, on our sixth anniversary, it is an interesting opportunity to look back at what our site has been in the past and to see how much we have grown.
All things considered, this has been our most successful year yet. This is particularly evident from our amazing $17,301.27 contribution to Beyond Blue last month and continued growth, recently surpassing 600,000 discussions and later this week we will have 250,000 registered members. We are in an incredibly stable position but as many of you have noticed we have slowed down with announcing new features and custom-developed tools for the site. This has been in anticipation for our biggest update in history which is a migration over from XenForo 1 to XenForo 2 and will be discussed today.
XenForo 2 Migration Plans
To give some background, MC-Market was founded in 2014 and since then we have had our forum built on the XenForo 1.5 (XF1) software. In 2017, XenForo 2.0 (XF2) was released which is completely rebuilt from scratch with numerous benefits, including generally just being more modern and easier to develop addons for. There has not been enough of a reason for us to migrate over to XF2 but in June last year, XenForo announced that XF1 will no longer be supported or receive new updates. This means that there will never be another version of XF1 developed, even for minor bug fixes or security vulnerabilities. Going forward, moving to XF2 is an inevitability for the future and so we have decided to begin our move over sooner rather than later.
Currently, we plan to complete our move to XF2 in early to mid 2021. Updating to XF2 is an incredibly arduous process and is massively difficult to do, requiring us to re-develop dozens of our custom addons we have created in the past, create a new theme and properly migrate all database tables over. Months have been spent documenting and planning our move, and development is now beginning for the addons we require. Combined, this project is taking us hundreds of hours to complete. We are in a position where we can recognise all of the great features and functionality that our site has, and we intend on keeping a lot of what makes us successful the same. All data is, of course, backed up constantly and during our migration we expect that all data, including accounts and posts, will be preserved.
You may be wondering why we are going through all of this effort, especially because out of the box XF2 does not provide us with any major new features. The main reason for our migration is to ensure that we can maintain the safety and security of our data as, to us, the data of our users is incredibly important. This isn't to say that your data isn't currently safe, but relying on software that is no longer supported is never ideal in the long-term. Secondly, migrating to XF2 gives us options to add more premade addons to the site. In the past few years, developers have stopped creating addons for XF1 and focused on XF2. There is now a plethora of hundreds of addons for us to potentially introduce to improve your experience on MC-Market which will be decided upon closer to our migration. Thirdly, XF2 is significantly easier to develop for and so it will enable us to create new features more easily and by additional skilled developers.
What does this mean for you? Unless you are an active member of our community we expect that other than a new theme there should not be any significant differences for you when using our platform. For active community members, this migration is an opportunity for you to help us by providing your ideas and feedback as we have and will continue to post regular updates for feedback from you in our Suggestions forum. This is the first opportunity we have had to essentially rebuild the site from the ground up (while keeping all data), and with that, I do not want to squander this chance to ensure that everyone is satisfied and happy with the changes being made. The following threads have been made for your feedback and ideas. If you have the chance, I would sincerely appreciate any responses to the following:
I am very excited to move to XF2, but for the first few days and weeks after moving we expect to have a significant amount of bugs and issues that will need to be resolved. This will be a huge update and it will likely be polarising with many people having issues, but we aim to fix everything and become stable as soon as possible.
Promotion & Advertising
We have never spent a cent on promoting MC-Market and all of our growth we have achieved up until now has been purely organic through searching or word of mouth. While this has very clearly worked out well for us and continues to, I think that we have far more potential if a larger focus is placed on marketing our platform. Currently, we plan that in the next few months we would like to slowly promote ourselves and then after our migration invest significantly into growth.
Given our position in our niche, I believe that it is difficult for us to compete. If you have experience in marketing or know someone who you think would be able to assist us, please open a conversation with me. Additionally, I have created a suggestion thread for ideas from you if you have any:
Birthday Sale
To celebrate this very exciting day we are holding a sale for the next 24 hours! There will be 50% off on all Account Upgrades and 25% off on Ads Manager purchases. The sale prices are automatically applied to all upgrades and to receive a discount for ads use coupon code '6THBIRTHDAY' at checkout.
Community UHC Event
Five months ago we released our first community UHC. Due to the success of the previous event and due to popular demand we are once again hosting another UHC for any community members who have been registered for over a month.
Our event will be held on the 8th of August at 4 PM EST (8 PM GMT) and we expect it to last approximately two hours. A countdown to the event is here:
We are once again holding the event with teams of two and recommend that players team up, but if you would prefer to play solo that option is also available. Unlike in our last event, there is no need to fill out a sign-up form in order to play. As long as you have your Minecraft account associated through this link you will be able to join 10 minutes before the game begins.
For anyone unfamiliar, UHC (Ultra Hardcore) is a game mode very similar to vanilla minecraft survival with a few key differences on our server:
- Players are spread throughout the world with the end goal of eliminating each other through pvp
- A world border that slowly decreases the arena size from 2000 blocks down to 25
- Health regeneration is disabled, only able to gain back health through golden apples and health potions
- Strength potions nerfed and regeneration potions removed
- The server is only accessible through minecraft on version 1.8
- All players usernames are set to their MC-Market username
Throughout the event, our staff team will be monitoring all players to ensure that they are following our event rules listed below. Any player found to be breaking these rules will be blacklisted from all future events and will likely receive warning points on the site depending on the severity of their abuse. A full set of all rules can be found below:
Infrastructure Upgrades
Due to the overwhelming amount of resources and attachments being uploaded to MC-Market on the daily, we’ve run out of server space yet again! It’s clear that we needed to change our approach and offload our attachments and resources to a separate dedicated storage server. However, this required big changes to the way files are both stored and served. One example of this would be our resource injector, which no longer had the files on system for immediate processing. A complete recode was made, while taking the opportunity to fix a few bugs that had previously been resulting in no file being provided as well as optimize the scanning and injecting processes and improve our logging details.
You may have noticed some hiccups in the delivery of resources recently. Currently, we are in the middle of the long process of transferring over all of our resource and attachment data. In order to support the new infrastructure as well as keep the site live while some of the data is still in its old location, we are running both the old and rewritten version of the injector at the same time. Which version will serve the downloaders of your resource depends on whether your resource data has been transferred over yet so if you see the old bugs still, please be aware that it’s likely due to still waiting to be transferred.
Moreover, we are aware that currently, large resources are taking a while for the download to initiate. Users trying to download large resources may need to wait a few refreshes of the waiting page after clicking the download button. Rest assured, you will still get your download, although it might require patience. This is due primarily to the fact that the injector is now running on a separate server from where the data is located, thus resulting in the data needing to be downloaded once, fully, before it is served to the user. We will be working on making more adjustments to our infrastructure to alleviate this overhead and demonstrate the fruits of the new scanning and injecting optimizations. Please be patient with us during this arduous process.
On a related note. We have been informed by a user of a security vulnerability that made it possible for unauthorized downloads to to be granted to malformed requests under certain conditions. We immediately patched the vulnerability which was identified as having been introduced back when the injector was originally merged with the site, by the same version of the same software that introduced the previous exploit of the same kind. Upon investigating our web traffic logs, we determined that this vulnerability was not actively being abused by anyone. However, we will under no circumstances allow even one accidental trigger to go uncompensated for. We have compiled a list of all of the malformed requests which could have possibly been viable and have thus far narrowed that list down to five potential downloaders. Unfortunately, due to its nature, this time we are unable to verify whether a download was actually granted to the malformed requests, but we will be providing compensation as if it was.
Moreover, none of the users who may not have received a file or known that their request was malformed will be issued any sort of punishment. Regardless of the small scale impact, we always want to ensure full trust and transparency with our resource authors. If there is any possibility you could have been impacted, you will receive a PM and all due compensation. We are currently conducting an investigation which follows all of the processes and potential outputs of the software responsible. It is expected to take much longer than would be reasonable to conduct for all of our commissioned addons, but will ensure that the implementation poses no further risk to our site and is safe for continued use.
In our previous announcement we introduced our third round of staff applications over two weeks which were a great success. Ally, twinightcreep0, and xdrien have joined our team as our new chat moderators. Geek has also been promoted to moderator.
Ads Manager Changes
As usual we have made some slight adjustments to the prices of some ad positions on the site. We have decreased the price of the resources sidebar banner from $20/week to $15/week, decreased sidebar squares from $50/week to $40/week and increased the homepage sidebar banner from $40/week to $45/week.
A list of the sticky thread price adjustments are as follows:
Account Security
Remember to enable 2FA on your accounts and maintain regular account security. Other websites you may be using are occasionally breached, just as Wattpad recently was. The most important thing that you can do for your security is to use a password for MCM that isn't being used anywhere else. Please change your password if this is not already the case.
Thank you so much for an excellent six years on MC-Market, and I'm very excited for what the future holds!
Mick
Attachments
Last edited:
