Crazy they make you pay for the cloud saves feature which is provided by Ludusavi - which is free OSS.

Ah that is probably my bad then, I read it as being able to redirect arbitrary URLs, hence the need for geoblock and abuse protections - if it’s only your own self-hosted/personal domains then yeah that absolutely makes sense.

Can I ask - why would anyone do this? Several URL shortening services of the past have shuttered and it has left the web littered with links to sites that can never be resolved (linkrot) - this to me just seems like a another surefire way to speedrun future deadlinks in forums etc. Why?

Edit - I have misunderstood the assignment.

This is targeted at self-hosted/personal-domain stuff only, not general internet site URL shortening/redirection.

It isn’t on the default port either, it’s on a random high number port which is why I thought it was extra odd they found it.

It isn’t on the default port either, it’s on a random high number port which is why I thought it was extra odd they found it.

Like the other commenter said, I dunno how the heck the griefers find the servers - but if it’s on the open Internet, they do.

I set up a server for me an a handful of mates - advertised the address nowhere. They told nobody. A month in a friend and I were playing as usual, and a player with a Russian username joined. I’m like “uh hi who are you?”. They stayed another minute or two while saying nothing, then left.

I think they left when they realized i had an anti-griefer permissions mod that protects the blocks in an area around the spawn point from being modified (its called ‘Flan’). So they joined, saw the server had some protections, and decided it wouldn’t be much fun for them.

Whitelist immediately enabled - no more random Russians.

In addition to other advice here just be aware that Minecraft servers are prime targets for griefing and abuse.

I recommend setting it to whitelist mode and then each kid your friend wants to join just has to send their username to him so you can add the username to the whitelist. Its an added overhead but it’s much less painful than reverting to a backup for a griefed server - and your kid won’t have to worry about other kids on-sharing the server address.