Stop no longer kills a busy server without saving your world

This release is mostly about honesty, and it starts with the one that could cost you something real.

Stop saves your world

Every Stop waits a moment to check on your server first. If that check came back unhealthy, we decided the server had never finished starting, shut it down instantly with no save, and told you: “Your server never finished starting, so we shut it down.”

The trouble is that the check is only a quick ping, and a server that is lagging or busy can fail it while running perfectly well. So a server that had been up for hours, with people on it, could be shut down mid-sentence and lose whatever had not been written to disk yet.

Now that check only means “never started” if we actually watched it fail to start. If your server is simply busy, it gets the normal, patient shutdown, and your world gets up to a minute to finish saving instead of being cut off almost straight away.

A very large or heavily modded world can need longer than a minute to save. If yours does, the save can still be cut short. That limit comes from the software that runs the server itself rather than from SpawnBox, and lifting it is work we have not done yet, so if a world comes back missing the last few minutes of play we would like to hear about it.

Server tabs

Your server tabs are built from the list of servers we can read. When we could not read them, we concluded you did not have any, dropped the tabs, and showed you the “Add a Server” screen you get on a fresh install. Not “we cannot reach your servers” but “you have never had one.”

Your servers were fine the entire time. We now say we cannot reach them and wait, instead of quietly rewriting your history.

Settings saves

Saving a setting worked by reading your server’s configuration, changing one thing, and writing it back. If that read failed, we did not stop. We carried on with a blank copy, so saving one setting could silently reset others, including your server’s address, whether it was meant to be running, and how players reach it.

This affected more than the subdomain screen we first noticed it on. The subdomain and main settings saves are fixed. A few other places in the app still read and write the same way, and we are working through them, so if a setting you did not touch changes on its own, please tell us.

What we say while things are recovering

When something went wrong behind the scenes, we used to guess, and we guessed confidently. This release replaces the guessing with what we actually know, including “we do not know yet.”

• A server that failed to start no longer sits there labelled “running.” If a start, stop or restart fails, the card says so, including the ones you did not click.
• “We cannot reach it right now” instead of “it isn’t running.” Those are different things, and only one of them is yours to fix.
• CPU and RAM say when they are old. If we could not get fresh numbers we kept showing the last ones as though they were current. The card now dims and tells you the reading is stale.
• Background Services no longer reports the Docker engine as healthy while it is actually stuck.

Create Server from Backup

Since 1.3.1, a server made with Create Server from Backup came up marked “Needs Cleanup”, and the only button we offered was Finish Cleanup, which deletes it. The copy itself was fine; we simply never told the rest of the app that it had finished.

It now finishes setting up and behaves like any other server. While the copy is still running, its tab reads “(Setting up…)” instead of offering to clean it up.

Copied and renamed worlds

Under some circumstances, a world you had copied or renamed could keep pointing at the operator and whitelist files of a different world. The server then failed before Minecraft even started, and kept trying and failing. We now check those settings every time a server starts, point them at the world actually being launched, and save the correction.

Friends connecting from outside your home

Letting friends reach your server relies on a Windows service called IP Helper. Some PC speed-up guides turn it off, and when it was off, friends could not connect even though every setting looked correct. If it has been turned off, we now switch it back on for you.

Backups marked partial

A backup could show as a Partial backup just because your server’s live log file changed while it was being copied. When that log is the only file involved, it no longer marks the backup partial. The log is still backed up and still retried next time, and anything involving your world files still counts.

Speed

Starting one server used to freeze every other server’s status for about forty seconds. It does not any more.

Background Services

We no longer ask for administrator permission in the one situation where that permission cannot help, and the Enable Background Services button no longer appears when they are already running perfectly well.