I have started to notice more and more claims that have been abandoned for more than 30 days and wanted a discussion about how the community thinks we should deal with these claims.

First of all, you need to know there are 3 types of Expiation settings we have options for, these are the current settings we impose

• ChestClaimDays: 7 Days (Claims made by your first chest laid down down)
• UnusedClaimDays: 14 Days (User created claims with little in them, protecting nature for example)
• AllClaimDays: 0 (Never expires) – Expires inactive players no matter the investment

In depth description of how expiration works on griefprevention taken from the griefprevention documentation:

Expiring Inactive Claims

GriefPrevention.Claims.Expiration.ChestClaimDays
default:7
A “chest claim” is the automatic claim created when players place a chest when they have no other claims. One of these claims will expire 7 days after the Owning player has last logged in.

GriefPrevention.Claims.Expiration.UnusedClaimDays
default:14
This is used in a similar fashion to the ChestClaimDays setting, but applies to claims created using the Claim Creation tool (by default, the Golden Shovel). the cleaning of these claims requires an investment score calculation to determine how many non-natural blocks are in the claim and essentially try to determine the “value” of the claim. This score gives a ‘score’ for various non natural blocks such as stone brick, glass, and chests, and subtracts points for things like lava and fire. If the calculated score exceeds the value in GriefPrevention.Claims.ClaimCleanup.MaxInvestmentScore, then the claim will not be cleaned up even if the claim owner has not been on in the given time period.

GriefPrevention.Claims.Expiration.AllClaimDays
default:0

When set to a non-zero value, this works similarly to the unusedClaimDays and ChestClaimDays settings, but forces claims that hit it’s expiry time to be cleaned up, regardless of investment score. This can be used to set an upper limit to prevent the long term presence of claims by players that have not been on the server for an extended period of time.

Claims build up over time. In the most extreme cases, this can eventually hurt the server’s performance because there are so many claims to search through. To eliminate this potential issue for long-term successful servers, some land claims will be automatically deleted when the owner has been inactive for a while AND has not invested effort in the claim by expanding it or by building in it. So the general rule is that if a player builds something substantial or plays regularly, his claims will never expire. If a player does not invest in his claim and then disappears for a period of time, his claim may be deleted to allow other players to use the area and maintain good server performance.

Players who have ONLY the free chest-created claim, have NOT expanded it, and who have been offline for a full week will have their claim cleaned up automatically. You can change this by setting the “ChestClaimDays” config setting. Set it to zero to disable entirely, but beware the performance cost.

Claims which appear to be unused (meaning very little is built in them, so they’re essentially protecting only nature) will be deleted after two weeks of owner inactivity. You can change this with the “UnusedClaimDays” config setting. Set it to zero to disable entirely, but beware the performance cost.

The “AllClaimDays” config setting is available to you in case you’d like to expire land claims for inactive players no matter how much investment they’ve made in the land claim. I advise against turning this on, since it will leave awesome builds (which are a credit to your server!) open to grief. It will, however, massively reduce your claim count.

By default, claims in creative rules worlds (see config notes above on designating creative rules worlds) will be automatically restored to a natural state when expired. Claims in other worlds will not, since building requires more effort in survival mode, so the loss is greater if the player does one day return to find his work vanished. You can change both of these settings in the config file.

It’s been suggested that there should be a permission which may be given to players to exempt them from claim expiration, for example for when players go on vacation. It’s an excellent idea, but Bukkit does not allow for checking an offline player’s permissions. 🙁 If this changes in the future, then I will add the requested permission node. For now, remember that in addition to being inactive, a player must have invested very little in a claim for it to be expired (assuming you haven’t enabled the AllClaimDays option), so the probability of something substantial being unclaimed is very low.

 

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