Security FAQ
ProtonAuctions is in public beta. See Beta Phase for what is stable and what is still maturing.
Straight answers to the hard questions about running a licensed, protected plugin, including the ones that make people nervous. No spin.
Can you remotely shut down or brick my server?
No. Nothing in ProtonAuctions can touch your server, your other plugins, your world or your data. What a licence problem can do is stop ProtonAuctions itself, and only ProtonAuctions. The licence is checked when your server starts and refreshed quietly in the background a few times a day. If your licence is revoked or ended, the next refresh notices it and the auction house stops running transactions. After the next restart the plugin does not enable until the licence is valid again. Your data is never locked or deleted while any of that happens, and the rest of your server carries on as normal. If the licence server is merely unreachable, the plugin keeps running on a saved proof for up to seven days. Right after an update, before the new version has been checked once, it starts with trading paused instead, and picks up on its own when the server answers. See Offline Grace. See Cracked Copies for what a lapsed licence means for your auctions.
What data does the plugin collect about me and my players?
To validate your licence, the plugin sends your licence key, a fingerprint of the machine, the plugin build and version, and the operating system family. Like any web request, the licence server also sees your server's IP address, which it keeps against the key to catch leaked keys being used from many places. Nothing about your players. Separately, during the beta a telemetry feature that is on by default can send anonymous server statistics and, to sharpen pricing, completed-sale figures with player names and UUIDs hashed on your server before they leave it. Detailed per-player behaviour is off by default, and you can turn telemetry off entirely in config.yml. The privacy page lists every field. Nothing that identifies a player leaves your server unless you choose to send it.
What happens if you shut down, or the licence server disappears for good?
Your data is encrypted with your installation key, not your licence, so it stays readable no matter what happens to us. And if the product is ever wound down, the plan is to ship a final build that no longer needs the licence server at all, so your servers keep running. You are never left with a dead plugin and unreachable data.
Isn't this the kind of DRM that gets plugins pulled for behaving like malware?
No. The behaviour that gets flagged is a plugin that constantly phones home and disables itself the instant it cannot connect. This does the opposite. It checks at startup, refreshes in the background a few times a day, and falls back on a signed, saved proof whenever the licence server cannot be reached, which is the failsafe that is actually recommended. It never holds your server hostage to a live connection.
Can it be cracked anyway?
We do not pretend any protection is unbreakable. What we will say is that a cracked copy does not work as an auction house, there is no half-working version to run, and the effort to change that buys nothing. The goal is to make cracking pointless, not to make grand claims.