As someone who has played Minecraft since 2011, coded various modifications for Minecraft, been an administrator for various servers, and been a griefer, I'll give my two cents on a few things.
Though I would like to say, everything I'm about to say is completely subjective to my experience with Minecraft, every server is different and everyone has their own ways of moderation, as well as the fact that I'm not really proof-reading this and you may not understand everything I'm talking about, so please keep that in mind.
When it comes to server moderation it is can be perfectly fine, to extremely finicky. This is because of 2 big reasons.
1 - On servers with more than 10-20 players, It is impossible to moderate the entire server player-base adequately at all times.
2 - The amount of cheaters/griefers playing the game.
For number one, when it comes to have having a large player-base, it is very difficult to keep track of every player's actions at once, so you can log specific actions and send it to the administrators so it is easier to track people doing instead of attempting to moderate the entire server through the chat and watching over players, when they have time, while invisible. It is also extremely helpful to have a ratio of a good ratio of admins/moderators to players, as this assists in how much moderation can be done and and how effective the moderation actually is. For example: if you have 1 admin and 20 players, and 4 or 5 players seem suspicious that admin will likely be watching over them a bit more than the rest of the other players leaving chances for the other players to break rules due to the admin's occupied status.
For number two, when it comes to griefers, you can log most grief with anti-grief plugins as well as track the history of modified blocks in any location on the map, this should combat most griefers in the traditional sense, the only downside is that most anti-grief plugins don't have live alert messages sent out to administrators and griefers can cover up a griefed structure to look like a naturally spawned part of the map but of course you can always just have a plugin to "own" specific parts of the map so only players with proper permissions can mess with it; Now, when it comes to cheaters it is either 100% obvious or extremely difficult to tell, certain client-sided modifications such as Fullbright, ESP, Xray, and Tracers are literally impossible to detect, although it is possible to tell if they are in use, primarily Xray as you can have a plugin send a message whenever someone mines a rare ore, other modifications such as Killaura (a combination of an aimbot as well as a specified attack speed) are easier to detect although you can still edit attributes on most modifications to the point of being nigh-undetectable, however, as someone who has coded cheats, including Killaura, before there are some signs to tell if one is active. To combat cheaters you can of course install anti-cheat plugins and moderate players you've received reports of, it is important to note that most hacked clients have killswitches intended to completely disable all game-changing modifications, and aside from that you can do a few other things but player moderation and anti-cheat are the best things you can do.
Now, regarding the actual thread and, you know, asking about starting up a Minecraft server, I'm all for it, it would give me a lot more interesting stuff to do in my free time as well as open up some new opportunities for people to join our community.
Of course, I'll go back to being dead again. À bientôt!
