As you will have realised if you’ve tried to connect to Purity Vanilla in the past few weeks, our main domain “mc.purityvanilla.com” has been unavailable for some time. This was due to a block placed on the server by Mojang, which is still in place at the time of this post.
What happened?
On the 26th of December our server domain was added to Mojang’s blocked server list, which meant that any client session which launched after this update was unable to connect to the server. This was confirmed by searching the list for SHA1 hashes of our root domain and subdomains.
You can view a list of identified servers actively blocked by Mojang here.
Mojang enforcement did not give any written warning or notice of the block, and later stated “if we can’t find an email we will block to get attention”. The admin contact information was only available on the webstore and was difficult to find. This was because, prior to now, it had only been intended for resolving purchase issues for players without Discord accounts.
What is taking so long?
We submitted an appeal through Mojang’s official form the day after the initial block. The appeal received no reply beyond an automated confirmation from their support system. We also opened a support ticket requesting an explanation for the block. Mojang did respond to the ticket, however it was just to request an appeal through the form we had already used. They also stated:
“The more specific you can be about why the server was blocked as well as what you have changed to make it compliant will help speed up the process.”
which was unfortunate, as we had not yet been given any reasoning at all about why the server was blocked. We replied to this support ticket to raise this concern and point out that an appeal for the server had already been filed using the same form. On the 30th, this ticket was closed with a statement that we must
“allow a window of time for reviews to be processed”.
All subsequent tickets and emails requesting updates on the appeal were closed with automated responses or ignored outright. This continued until the 13th, when we reached to a member of Mojang’s enforcement team on Discord (at the suggestion of someone on our own Discord server) to request help with our appeal. Within 2 hours of their reply to our Discord DM, we received a response to one of our previous emails stating the violations found on our server and what must be done to get it unblocked.
What happens next?
In Mojang’s latest response, they stated that Purity Vanilla
“must have ZERO builds and chat that are tied to hate speech and/or discrimination”
in order to be eligible for a server review. To comply with this, we are changing our server rules for the first time since 2019 to explicilty require that all builds, items, chat messages and other player content must not violate the Minecraft EULA and Xbox Community Standards. This will be enforced as strictly as all of our other rules and in accordance with the server’s ban policy. In future:
- Any existing builds or items on the server which do not comply with these standards will be removed.
- Creation of new noncompliant builds or items will lead to immediate punishment of the players responsible.
- If you see anything on the server which does not comply with the EULA or Xbox Community standards, please report it to server staff by joining our Discord and creating a ticket here.
- A chat filter will be added to block noncompliant messages on the server.
Our new rules
We have updated our server rules across all sites to explicitly require compliance with the Minecraft EULA and Xbox Community Standards (which the Minecraft Community Standards affirm). This bans any form of hate speech or discrimnatory statements on the server.
1. No hacked clients, prohibited client modifications, X-ray or ESP.
2. No exploits or lag machines
3. You must act within the Minecraft EULA and Xbox Community Standards
Clarifications on these rules and examples of violations can be found here.