Hello, this is my personal opinion or theory on how Minecraft servers create a successful community of active players.  In no way is this 100% accurate considering how it's based on my opinion.  It would be nice if you were to take this into consideration because it could be good knowledge to have while running a server.
There are two primary things to have to ensure a successful server.  These things are expansion and retention.  I will go over each of the two fields in depth and explain why they are necessary for a successful server.


Expansion

Server expansion in simple terms is 'the ability to bring new players onto your server'.  This is obviously important because without it your server would be void of players since there are not any players joining.  Expansion is the primary way to bring a constant or temporary flow of new people into your server and you can expand your server by lots of means.  A very popular way of server expansion is the voting network; your existing members vote on sites where potential new members look for a server to settle into.  More ways of expansion include:  server endorsement, youtube endorsement, in-game recruiting, friend invitation award system, etc.


Retention

Just as important at expansion, retention is the ability to retain new players (ways of having players return to the server).  Retention is incredibly important to have because it creates ways to keep a longer term population of active members that came from server expansion.  Server retention is vital to have once you've expanded your server?without retention those new players will not stay on the server thus making your expansion methods useless.  Ways of retention can stretch from having a welcoming community that makes connections with new players to having unique game mechanics that are fun and interesting to use.

In conclusion, expansion and retention are both vital to a server's health.  You gain fresh members from  server expansion and the server's retention allows you to keep the new players returning to your server to eventually become active members.  These fields work together, you can not have one without the other.  Having this knowledge in mind, owning a server can become more objective?What do I have to expand my server and how can I retain new players?

Thank you for reading and I appreciate feedback.

TLR  Expansion = ways to attract new members, Retention = ability to keep new members returning.  Expansion and retention work together to create a successful server.

erased!.

In Hardcore factions to make it even more hardcore, turn off Natural Regen.

So on HCF zombies can mine towards you, which when trying to make large builds underground gets really bloody annoying. So I was thinking of adding a custom potion that would basically make you invisible to zombies for a set amount of time. Now if they were in the same room as you they could attack you, but they wouldn't be able to known where to mine to get to you.

I try to help out new players whenever they join by telling them to do /vote and showing them around and it usually makes them stay for much longer. I see many other players ignore them and treat them poorly. If many people help new players it would help all the new players that join stay longer. There could be a reward such as five points that could be handed out by a Warden. It could be called a 'Help Token'. If a Guard watches a player help out (could be a fellow guard) they can tell a Warden to give them a Help Token. It would be a motive for other players to help new players. I understand it could be abused so there should be a limit of maybe three Help Tokens per week. Just an idea I came up with in my free time. Btw xxLink helped me with some of the ideas. Sorry if there are any grammatical mistakes.

my steam wallet is ready

I'm unbanned from forums everyone you ready for epicness? 

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxpTx0VDBKw[/youtube]

IGN: strawburry_cream
Who banned you? Astral I think?
When were you banned? (Time/Date) August 19th
Why were you banned? get your memes out of my FACE YOU BAD MEME MAKER
Are you at fault? No
What was your rank on MCP? Free
Why should we unban you? Because honestly I think that was a really immature reason to ban someone, and I'm dedicated to MCP.
Additional info: Sorry for whatever I did?

#1: Make the rank system less complicated, what I mean by this is the first rank is C then B then A the jumps to E... if you make it more simple it won't be so off putting to those 8 year olds who see that and are confused.

#2: Make it where as long as you are a C,B, or a A block you will always have a combat timer which means you can't attack people and they can't attack you, I have seen multiple players ( Probably young and stupid 8 year olds ) get killed because their timer ran out then they quit and they don't know that and someone including me kills them.

#3: If #2 happens, guards can't call for their contraband because they aren't allowed to do anything with them. The reason behind this is that most of mcp's population is very young children so when they suddenly get jailed for sword, they are wondering why, because most prisons do not do that then they quit because that was " unfair " and most likely they didn't read the rules.

#4 Make the starter armor diamond armor because for those stupid people, they are like, " Why do I get this shitty armor? " Even know it has p4 on it the leather is off putting.

That is it for this suggestion, if you want more soolas tell me thanks for reading - cougar

My brother was on my computer and deleted something very important so I am waiting for keth to get back to fix it.