Grierfers and Unwanted Guests

It has been only 2 days and a lot has happened, including some problems. We need to decide how we are going to deal with these problems.

The Reasons

As almost all of you have noticed, many random players are coming on, people we do not recognize. While not all of them are griefers, there are some who have been messing with the server by ruining buildings and just being annoying. One trio of unwanted visitors did the old "I am a server reviewer so give me op" trick and followed up with the "I am a master hacker so give me op or you die" gag (which if they can hack your server, why don't they just hack themselves as an op?). It was harmless and the players are banned, but it still is annoying. Now I don't know which players to trust, especially when the server is so new. I even shut the whole server down because I didn't know what to do with 3 players.
So you may be asking, like me, where are these players coming from? Our server has been opened 2 days, not long enough to become a big hit for such a wave of players to be logging in. In fact, there are about 100 players who have logged in that I don't recognize. I found our answer with some google, interviews with these players, and help from Ion. They are coming from not just one, but multiple youtube videos showing cracked pvp servers that have our ip! But that is not all, our IP already has its own mcservers page!
Now the reasoning behind the youtube videos is probably this: those servers used to have that IP, but no longer do. This usually can happen when the server shuts down, because it is likely that is being hosted. The hoster won't just throw that IP away, it will give it to the next customer. Also, each IP can have ports besides the default Minecraft port, 25565, so sometimes multiple servers can be run from the same IP. Our server is run in Chicago, which is a famous place to host a server. Probably these servers once had our IP bu no longer do, so people are logging in thinking we are a cracked PVP server. The mcservers page may have a similar reason, or it may just be that it constantly adds other IP's.

The Solution

One word: whitelist. I know it can be very annoying, but Ferf is sure he got everyone. Here is the complete list:

RedNXT
BlueNXT
AtomicScientist2
SmartFlyngWarior
Sacha862
FerfyDerf
Capt_Zach
cpa_98
recongrunt
bears_wear_hats
JohnnyB123
JohnnyB321
LUModder
_MrTwister
Bane7799
MysteryJediMan
Alec_Warper
phil2947
Vicotaco
shadowsolx
Minecraft1415926
pencilsharp333
TheBrickBuilder
Satlmd
ocarinahero1234
UniversalDelta
Christography

This will keep off all unwanted visitors. If you don't see your username on this list, then please tell us so we can add you to the whitelist. And if you have a friend you are inviting us to the server, go ahead and tell us his or her username to so they can enjoy the fun, too. Hopefully this whitelist won't be too annoying and hopefully keep off unwanted, random users for now until we decide we want random users joining.

In other news, Dynmap is back up. Just click on the link above and get a good view of the whole map.

Until next, "The Imagine Nation never ends!"