[WIP]: Prism. Rollback/Grief Prevention You've Been Waiting For

Prism is truly the rollback plugin for your server. It's unlike anything you've ever seen because it captures almost every event that can help catch griefers, and is near perfect at rolling everything back.

Prism offers multiple tools to find what happened - inspection wands, nearby logs, lookup tools, an extremely powerful, yet easy-to-use (and safe!) query system.

Ever seen rollbacks of half doors, handles on the wrong sides, blank signs, broken beds, lost torches and other items that pop off, or blocks that fell afterward? Prism tracks associated block changes to the original player - so breaking a block with rails (and many, many other items) on top shows they broke it all. Not only does Prism handle all of those scenarios but we go even further with your grief management experience.

Prism is extremely fast, both in recording all of these events and in rollbacks/restores. It's extremely configurable, and was designed with busy servers in mind. It's chat messages are beautifully clean and simple - and never spam you.

But Prism goes even further!

It's designed to protect you and your staff from making mistakes and reverting more than intended. Prism allows preview mode for both rollbacks and restore, and uses several safe default parameters - they can be configured, they can be overridden within the command, but they cannot be bypassed by simply forgetting them. No more typos making you rollback two weeks of builds.

But Prism goes even further!

Certain rollbacks trigger other functionality. For example, rolling back a burning forest will extinguish the fire at the same time. Massive item drops from explosions will be removed when the tnt/creeper damage is reverted. Don't like those? Turn them off in the config.

Prism also allows you to rollback entity kills (sheep retain their colors!), to rollback items taken from chests; track who's been shearing you sheep, associate the entire tree to whoever planted grew it, and dozens more!

Holy cow, Prism goes even further!

We give you a number of additonal tools not normally found with rollback tools. Use the separate extinguish command to put out fires, drain water and lava nearby, use the rollback wand for very specific block rollbacks, the profile wand to get exactly data about a block.

Prism is currently in BETA testing on a few servers and we're working very hard to have a public release ready for you all in the coming weeks. However, just because it's beta doesn't meant it's not stable and extremely well tested.

Are YOU as EXCITED as we are? Let us know how you plan to use Prism in the comments, and feel free to ask any questions or make suggestions. We're not stopping until everyone gets to see how amazing Prism is.


Read the full wiki page:
http://dhmc.us/wiki/view/prism/

Watch an introduction/demonstration:


File bugs or feature requests:
https://snowy-evening.com/botsko/prism/

I like the name.

Anyone know how emm ram consuming this is?

We haven't done any profiling yet but it runs without issue on a server with only 1GB of ram.

This is seriously impressive.

Are there any plans for a web interface? That's the "killer app" that's keeping me tied to HawkEyeReloaded for the time being; if you guys offered something similar, I'd switch over in an instant

Yes. We will have a web interface by the time we release. What features do you feel are essential for a web interface?

Is it MySQL or flat file? So far I am really liking this

MySQL for now. We may add additional database support before release but I can't say for sure.

There's two key features that I would appreciate.

1. Focused on search. When I use HawkEyeReloaded's web interface, I'm usually there either to get all of the recent interactions involving a particular player or all of the recent interactions of a particular type, but being able to narrow the search down even more is always a plus.
2. Multiple accounts for web interface accessibility (or at least multiple passwords.) I give each of my server's staff members a unique password to the web interface so that I can rescind access on an individual basis without inconveniencing the other staff when one of them retires.

Thanks for being receptive to people's suggestions - I'm looking forward to using Prism when it's released ^^

There's definitely a gap in this space left by all-but-abandoned tools, so if you actually deliver on this and meet or exceed performance of other plugins in this space (LogBlock & HawkEye being the heavyweights), then hats off to you.

However, those plugins would not have survived at all if their authors hadn't open sourced them. It would be foolish to switch out a core anti-grief plugin to one other devs can't get source to carry on when the original developers disappear and take their source with them.

Maybe it is open source, if so, I don't see a single link anywhere in this forum or the web pages linked here and a search result on github turns up nothing. If you're going to keep it closed source, I'm not about to risk having all my anti-grief block history in a plugin that we can't have source to; the track record of churn (and abandonment) in the plugin author community is too high for anyone to sanely consider that risk.

I understand. We haven't made any decisions on whether it'll remain closed source or not, but it's worked fine for CoreProtect so far.

I had only given CoreProtect a cursory glance previously, as you've now pointed out it's closed source it is another plugin I will pass on. Some admins will run closed source plugins, my experience with the Bukkit community is more often than not they'll regret it when the author goes AWOL and they're stuck with incompatible plugins on future versions of Bukkit (or MC-API, or...).

It's your plugin and your source, so I respect your choice and I have no doubt some people will run it anyway even if it's closed source. I've been around the MC community long enough that I won't run any closed source plugin because I've learned from the painful experience of having to rip out plugins we've come to depend on when they break and the authors are gone; compared to the open source ones where we can patch them up to get by and then take our time looking for alternatives when Bukkit introduces API breaks. And with open source, myself or other plugin authors can carry the work forward later if original devs go missing and the plugin is good enough that we'd rather keep it than replace it with something else (this certainly sounds like it would be one of those).

I'll be watching with interest to see if the open sourced path is chosen and if so, I look forward to seeing this plugin in action.

Again, I haven't decided either way. I understand the benefits extremely well and have plenty of open source plugins available but have also really been burned by people stealing everything I did and claiming it as their own (and I've invested hundreds of hours making this plugin).

If I do decide to keep it closed source it's only because I intend to be involved in it's care and upkeep. If the time comes that I can no longer make the time to maintain it, I'd open the source. That's sure a trust factor but I do programming and development for a living, I'm going to be here to open it.

Anyway, we'll have a public beta out soon. Thanks

First public beta has been submitted for approval. Once approved, it'll be on:

http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/prism/

This is a great looking plugin and if you are looking for any sort of web development for the web interface of things you could contact me here, unless you already have someone (or yourself 0_0).

Thanks a lot for the offer, I may take you up eventually. For now I've got it under control and will finish up the web ui once the second beta is officially out.

what about worldedit logging ?

Versions currently on bukkitdev do not have this, but we've already got the work done and tested and the next updates will.

fantastic! Will properly give it a try sometime after beta (to be sure everything is ready..)

We use the term "beta" only in the sense that we want a little leeway to explain any problems but so far it's been working perfectly on our servers and no critical bugs have been reported after 400 downloads/100+ servers using it after only four days since the first file went up. I'd say it's safe to use but understand waiting as well.

I installed this plugin, and when I opened my server, and typed /prism nothing happened. I tried that in the console but the same result occurred. Any help???

Which version? You sure you've got a database setup? Prism disables itself if no mysql/sqlite databases are configured.

I think you should change a tiny bit on the chat formatting for checking blocks, by adding the coords

We're already running out of room to cleanly print things. While we're considering eventually making the format of the logs configurable, this is what the near/inspector help narrow down when you're looking for exact coords.

Oh I see. Thanks!

I love this plugin! Seemed so hard at first, then I used it.

Looks great. I do agree with open-sourcing though.

We are open source.

Where's the repo?

https://github.com/botskonet/Prism

We have not yet added the link to our sites but will eventually.