Wipe all TotalFreedomMod player data when moving from 2021.06 to 2021.09

Before you get out your pitchforks, let me explain why I am suggesting this. I understand that a solution like this, in all likelihood, will piss a lot of people off, and I don't blame you. This is a rather drastic change, and I really didn't want to suggest something like this. This solution is not in any shape or form intended to inconvenience players on here, but to resolve a technical issue that would allow us to expedite migrating to UUIDs for player data.

The implementation

All player data in the TotalFreedomMod will be backed up, and then wiped. Everyone will be at a clean state, but can request to have their coins, shop items, and other types of data restored manually. In return, however, we will get a player data system with exponentially better stability. No more marking regular players as impostors when you use a different IP. No more losing player data when you change usernames. No more Discord verification.

Other solutions I've considered

Before coming to this solution, I had considered some other options that would do the same thing and keep player data automatically, however I realized that these solutions weren't viable for one reason or another.

Converting player data individually on join

This solution sounds feasible at a first glance, but it too has its fair share of problems. The main one is simple: multiple lookups would need to be performed on join if a player has no valid player data, which is dangerously bad for performance.

Converting all player data on startup

I tested this method using an older copy of the database used by the server, but found that attempting to get the UUID of a player using a name in itself is problematic, which make this approach far from viable.

1. It's unreliable, as Spigot will automatically generate one (which won't actually link to a valid account) if there is no Minecraft account with the name.
2. There is no way to get UUIDs of players using past usernames, meaning once you've changed your name, that name will return a "Not Found" error until someone takes the name.
3. Spigot takes a long ass time to get player data for nonexistent accounts, which would cause the conversion process as a whole to take literal hours.

↩  erin Your player data (coins, shop items, login message, tags, master builder rank, ride mode, total vote count, notes, and whether or not to display Discord messages) would be wiped unless you request to have it restored post-wipe.

↩  lyicx My hope is that Ryan is willing to put the backed up data in at least Executive channels for this exact reason.

↩  Zarcana Guild data will not be affected as that is managed by a separate plugin.

↩  Telesphoreo If I recall correctly, the database contains more than 4K total player data entries. That was pulled from a copy of the database from about April 2021. It would take a very long time to convert all of that data manually.

↩  DragonSlayer2189 They don't have an API?

↩  DragonSlayer2189 These are fairly hackish solutions that do two things I really don't want:

1. Anything about pulling from HTML
2. Adding yet another useless dependency to a project that already has an absurd amount of dependencies

↩  Telesphoreo If Mojang didn't make it extremely difficult to get a player's UUID through a past name, I would have absolutely agreed. However, various factors (such as the inability to get UUIDs from an account's past names and just name changing in general) have made that very difficult to pull off.