I write this story more than any other reason to preserve the memory of this incident in some way as my memory of the relevant events begins to fade as my life goes on. Since I stopped running my Minecraft server I went to college, became a published author, and took up ballroom dance, among other things. As other things in my life take center stage I want the memory of this event to survive somewhere, and on Odyssey it shall be: the story of how my small server successfully resisted a well-known griefer.

His name was S1ege79; we were neo.lucidgreen.com, a small server that had up until that point existed for about a year and a half. On our second map, we were greeted with an influx from a long defunct server called Gods and Idols, which we quickly integrated into the fold. My real life friends and my online friends merged into a single coherent group of people who frequented one single server, and we were so much the better for it. Into the wilderness we build our little empire, with towns such as Wanderer’s Reach and Sparta linked together through a massive rail network.

And then all our creations started to vanish in clouds of smoke, craters left where buildings once were. We were inexperienced in running servers and as such had no inkling of what happened when our cities were brought to ruin. As such, for about a year we lived in utter terror, our politics in a constant state of paranoia and suspicion. As administrator, I wanted to keep the server open, but eventually I bowed to the consensus to impose a whitelist. Nevertheless there were alias accounts and we were still afraid.

We eventually hatched a plan to get rid of him once and for all. We would not only ban his account, but his IP address (on behalf of my father, who did a lot of server technical work). It was something that not many servers did, but we felt it necessary to go to extreme measures to quarantine the threat.

But we would have to lure him on to get his IP address. To do so, one of our members contacted him whilst posting as a griefer, and told him she had special information. He was interested, and got with her in a skype call.

Meanwhile, the rest of us kept note on the server. When he came on to scout, we all popped on and found him. We enquired as to what he was doing, fully aware his excuses were just that. When it was time, we all accosted him in unison. My father put in the command to ban his IP, and that was that.

Writing it down does make it seem underwhelming, but in the moment we were ecstatic. The longstanding object of terror was gone. We built a monument on that map, and one on every subsequent map. It had the names of the participants on multiple signs. And in the coming years, we would celebrate that day, December 13th, 2012, as our Fourth of July.