I think Mumsnet should start 2 Minecraft servers.

[FairyTiggybelle]

One for children and adults - No swearing.
One for adults - Swearing encouraged.

Anybody else?

MN Minecraft?

Mumcraft?

It'll be like a chat room you can build. And our (your) children would have a safe, grief free server to play on.

And techy Mumsnet can play on it and call it work!

Yy. And no stealing on the children's one. Dd1 made the mistake of befriending people on her fave server. She invited them to her island and then left them there while she went to bed. Now she has no chest and no sand or something It was bad anyway and our internet connection only supports a server of upto 4 people, so she is very fed up. She wants to rent a server.

But what if I build my dream home and some troll comes on and firebombs it?

It would be through Mumsnet, so griefing would get a MN ban. Possibly.

You can roll back the server to before the attack, IF it's your server. That's why a it's good to have a trustworthy person running it.

My son makes servers. How many people are we likely talking about?

No idea. I'm more of an ideas Fairy really.

Depends how many are interested. I'm guessing 100? maybe?

Sounds like a great idea, especially if there's no griefing.

I've just started playing and have had a real laugh with DS, especially when he started whizzing around in a minecart

Sounds like a brilliant idea.

What's so interesting about minecraft? I had a go of the online demo a while ago and it seemed painfully boring.

Non believer! I shun you!

Imagine Lego, but imagine you were Lego sized and the animals were alive and there were bad things that tried to kill you at night. It's such an immersive experience.

Not as cool as it used to be in the old days though.

Lid like my son to have a safe server to play on!

Awesome idea!

The servers can't cope with just MN and we already have issues with invasions when it's dark.

My DS is a HUGE minecraft fan too.
Will ask Tech if he has an suggestions?

Good idea. My son is always complaining that someone has stolen his stuff. We have had to have the "most people on the internet are idiots" talk more than once.

I'm in. Ds has a server that holds 20, so I don't think we'd fit.

Can anyone explain servers on minecraft to me? I'm a complete technostupid and because I don't understand the server stuff I've told DS1 he can't play online.

Good idea. Ds1 is a helper on a server, and also runs his own server. Tech can employ him as mc admin.

Yay! Fingers crossed tech can cobble something together!

Bit of a zombie, but my ds keeps on asking me if tech had any ideas/if there is a safe minecraft server he can play on?

Please?

It's a lovely idea (I have two Minecraft fans myself) but not sure it's going to get to the top of tech's to-do list any time soon.

Might be best to start a 'Safe Minecraft servers?' thread somewhere in Chat or Parenting or Geeky Stuff, maybe?

This would be awesome, and is something I would love to be able to do, however I'm not sure how practicable it would be. It looks like it would require plenty of know how, time and money.

The know how would be the easy bit - an evening's googling should shed more light on putting a server together; renting the server space and sorting out the set up details. We'd have a white-list and only add usernames given by MNers. Easy. We'd have simple rules; no griefing, no swearing on the youngster-friendly server, and we'd ban anyone breaking the rules. We'd need a few trusted moderators to look after it. Simples.

Time - I'm not entirely sure how much moderation a private server would need, but I would imagine it would be similar to MN needing MNHQ around to step in when rules are being broken/trolls have invaded. My cynical thinking is that it would be naive to expect running a server to be trouble-free.

Money's the real issue; someone would have to pay to fund the hosting. I've had a quick look into it and it seems that server hosting could cost around $1 per person, per month. For a 16 person server that would be $192 a year. A bigger server with more user slots will, I imagine, cost more. I'm going by the comments on this article.