u/enoua5

Last night I got an unexpected "unknown host" error trying to connect to my friend group's server. I spent literal hours pouring over DNS records, routing tables, port forwards, TCP dumps, all that.

Turns out, Mojang maintains a list of "blocked servers" (as hashes so it's harder to search). If your domain or IP address shows up in the list, minecraft will refuse to connect. It won't even give you the courtesy of a proper error message, you just get "unknown host" message and no log messages.

After concluding we were on this list, we got sent down another rabbithole checking server logs for any unauthorized joins that may have caused problems when we accidentally left the white-list off. Nothing.

Eventually, we found and were exploring mc-blacklist, which keeps a record of changes to the blacklist. Well, there was a massive ban wave a month ago and additional ban/unban waves every few days since. Looking through the list of known servers, nearly every recently banned server had some swear word in their MOTD, and nearly every unbanned server had an MOTD with words like "shoot" or messages like "MOTD Changed per Mojang Enforcement Request".

We had a mild swear word in our MOTD. We changed it, and were unbanned several hours later. We had no official way of knowing this is what we had to do, it was actively hidden from us; we couldn't even find official mentions of the block list, let alone an appeal form.

Just throwing this on here in case it saves someone 4 hours of debugging a strange "unknown host" error.

Hi, everyone!

As many of you have noticed, the sub has been growing quite a bit over the past several months, which has led to a few new creative trends emerging and finding community here.

Of particular note are the comics and short stories that have been carrying on their own continuing story arcs and inside jokes. We love seeing this creativity, and are glad to be a home for it; however, at the same time, several users have voiced concerns about this content drowning out the more traditional meme posts, or about posts alienating new users by requiring too much context.

We've discussed among the mods different approaches on how to best support both aspects of the community. We've decided to take an approach employed by many other subreddits: designating days of the week for the subgenre. We will be, starting this weekend, implementing "Comic Weekends".

What this will entail, is that on most days we will be more strictly enforcing rule 2 ("Be Humorous and Obviously Relate to the TF Community or Subculture") than we presently are; posts that aren't a self-contained meme will be removed. On weekends, however, we will be more lax regarding rule 2, to allow for users posting comics or other serial or lengthy content to follow their creative intent without worrying about making sure it counts as a "meme".

Feel free to leave feedback about this rule change either here or in the modmail. We'll be keeping this post pinned for a few weeks as a place for users to leave feedback on the implementation and see if we need to make any adjustments.