Several weeks have passed at this point and a lot has happened. We wanted to address a few key points. The Sponge community is absolutely thriving! It is thanks to the hard work and contribution of everyone involved that we have gotten to this point. To summarize, here below are major recurring bits of information throughout the forums and other mediums.

Community Inspired Development and Teamwork

At its very core, Sponge is a community driven, open source software system. It takes the hard work and creative ideas of a lot of people to come up with the next generation of Minecraft servers. A lot of this information gets lots in the fog and can be extremely hard to find with the epic number of threads and comments being created in Sponge’s new found popularity. Some people have worked really hard to put a lot of that information in one place. Here are a few threads that will help you find your way to good, solid information brought to you by the community. Major development announcements are always pinned, tweeted, or made readily available and so aren’t as difficult to find.

Important/Interesting Links […for Newbies!] - @MrMysteri0us

Common misconceptions about Sponge (and relevant) - @xxmarijnw

[List] Sponge Staff - @MrMysteri0us

[Overview] Sponge Core - @IDragonFire

Coming from Bukkit? Here’s Some Tips and Tricks to Get you Started - @Tux2

User’s Guide to Sponge Forum’s Text Formatting [Guide] - @epicTylev

Many other threads center around getting to know each other or just having fun. While a lot of other forums have these threads, not many fill up so quickly. It’s amazing to see so many communities pull together from so many different places, both around the world and around the internet.

We’ve had a fantastic thread started by @zF4ll3nPr3d4t0r filled with the backstories of both Staff and community members and where they have come from and what they’ve done.

In order to familiarise yourself with the nuances of SpongeSpeak, we suggest you take a look at @Inscrutable’s Sponge Lexicon. If you have an interest in the mythos of Sponge, we suggest you purview the works of our Porous Poet in his Bardic Extrapolation (Rime of the Ancient Sponge).

Just a shameless plug here, but I’d love to remind everyone, if you see anything funny, crazy or even just plain dumb on #sponge or #spongedev, post it in our Random IRC Quotes Thread for all to snicker at.

The most popular, and arguably funniest thread on the forum has been “Corrupt-A-Wish” created by @BlizzardFyre.

The Off-Topic category is filled with fantastic threads made by many of our most enthusiastic forum-goers. This is the spirit of our community. There are so very many topics that we can’t share them all.

Plugin Porting

We’re happy to announce that 400 plugins so far have confirmed their intention to port to Sponge once our API is ready. We’re all excited to have such interest in the project and for the abundance of plugin developers ready to endorse it. The presence of many plugins, large and small, vital and niche on the below list is an excellent development for the future of this community.

Here is the full list of plugins to be ported.(Courtesy of @BlizzardFyre’s thread)

Competing APIs

Now in recent days, many of you would notice the proliferation of threads regarding competing APIs such as Husk, Rainbow and even a little appearance by Granite. Our opinion on these separate projects is that while we’d prefer a unified approach, we welcome any competition. If they can do things better than Sponge can, we might learn something from them that could improve upon how we develop our API. To that end we have decided to permit the threads to remain open, though we will be policing them to prevent any flame wars.

Plugin Hosting

How Sponge decides to host and/or distribute plugins will be one of the defining features of the platform in the same manner that it has been for both Bukkit and Forge. There are many things to be debated, such as the merits of a centralised or decentralised system (and thus community), along with the balance between speed and security. Plugin Hosting is one critical element for how we develop as a community and, we welcome the entire community’s input on this subject so that we can consider all the options in order to provide the best system for both developers and server admins.

Join the discussion here.

What’s Next?

As a community, we’ve covered a lot of ground in a very short period of time. There is a lot more work ahead of us, but it’s good to take a little break and look back at what’s been done so far. Some of the work isn’t strictly development focused. Getting large numbers of people together and focused on a common goal isn’t a simple task. Take some time and look around at what we are all working on, some of us as developers, and others as friends who just like a cool place to hang out.

That’s where we’ll have to leave you for now, however we’ve been greatly impressed by the amount of content and fun that you, the community have created. Keep reading, posting and discussing, as it is only through your belief and interest in our project that Sponge can progress. Keep the creativity flowing!

Written by collaboration from @Owexz and @DarkArcana