Welcome to the Honeypot Wiki
What is Honeypot?
Honeypot is a plugin designed to catch griefers and malicious players, not just protect against them. It's meant to catch players who are enticed to grief builds. Simply turn a block into a Honeypot and wait for a player to interact with it. Depending on your settings, it can either simply be a notification to staff, the player can get banned, a custom command like /jail could be run.
If you're a developer, Honeypot lets you extend its functionality even further by providing a BehaviorProvider API and publishing events that can be listened to for some other purpose.
Why Honeypot?
👀 Privacy focused. We don't want your data! Most plugins are open source, but those that aren't are difficult to review, meaning you can't check what they're doing! This plugin only collects basic statistics using bStats and nothing more. bStats is a trusted analytics system, and is used everywhere. It's even embedded in Paper and the Velocity proxy. If you want to know more about this in layman's terms, I'm happy to share! You can view all stats here.
💪 Lightweight. Honeypot is feature packed, but still manages to be lightweight. It's extremely quick to process events, preventing unnecessary lag while protecting your server at the same time. Is Honeypot too lightweight for you? Lucky you! There are plenty of extra events packed into Honeypot that can be enabled with the flip of a config switch! These events may cause Honeypot to consume more resources, but help protect your server against even the strangest events.
😄 Easy to update. Honeypot does its work using simple, well known and documented Paper APIs or well-known libraries, avoiding complex systems such as NMS (At least, within its own codebase). This makes it easy to understand and update if/when breaking changes occur. If Honeypot does use complex systems like NMS, it does so with well known and well maintained libraries such as ProtocolLib.
🔨 Easy to build upon. For the software developers out there, Honeypot uses Dependency Injection and dynamically loads storage and behavior providers at load time dynamically. Not only does this make it possible for plugin developers to add functionality to Honeypot, but it also makes it extremely easy to update for the maintainers. Everything has been written in a way that allows a developer to just add new code instead of having to modify vast swaths of existing code.
🏋️♂️ Does the heavy lifting. Once Honeypot is set up in a way you like it, it does the heavy lifting for you. It is virtually a "set it and forget it" system. You are in charge of how much or how little power Honeypot has on your server. You could, theoretically, configure it in a way to never have to touch it ever again.
Honeypot is always getting better, with new features being added all the time and improvements made each day. However, I am not a one-man band! If you have an idea, submit an enhancement request or even a Pull Request! I'm always happy to have contributors 😄
Installation
Installing Honeypot is simple. Just download it from one of the many locations it's available (The footer contains all of those), then drop it in your server's Plugins folder.
On first boot Honeypot will generate all the configuration and database files needed to function. Changes to the configuration files can be applied by using /honeypot reload in-game.
FAQ
Q) Is Honeypot efficient?
A) Honeypot tries to be as efficient as possible. It caches Honeypots in memory to prevent costly database queries, it does its best to stop processing an event or events as early as it can, and has many other features to help with speed. More recently, Honeypot supports the Spigot PDC API, which removes the dependency on SQLite for storing block data (Player and Player History are still stored in the DB, but they are way more performant when queried). As of v3.4.0, Honeypot's internal DB uses R*Tree, which increased performance by 97% in testing! It shouldn't cause too much lag on your server, however I'm always optimizing. If you have an issue with the plugin or a suggestion on how to improve it, please let me know!
Q) Is Honeypot secure?
A) I've taken all precautionary steps to ensure Honeypot is secure and doesn't provide any security vulnerabilities to your server. Honeypot is obviously a Spigot plugin so it is only as secure as Spigot. It doesn't store any personal information about players or servers, and only collects anonymous statistics via bStats. The plugin is open source for peer review. SonarCloud used to be used, but I haven't succeeded in configuring it yet when I switched to Gradle. Once I get it back running it will be available for public review.
Q) How does Honeypot work?
A) When you mark a block as a Honeypot, its location and action is stored in the storage mechanism of choice (By default this is SQLite, but PDC is also natively supported. Other storage providers can be programmatically added). Honeypot listens to up to 17 different events, such as Block Break, Block Burn, Entity Explode (Such as TnT), and many more. These event listeners contain logic to determine whether the event was on a Honeypot block and, if so, who caused the event and what action should be taken. Then, when a player interacts with that Honeypot, the action is retrieved, the plugin looks up the code for how the action should be processed, and finally the action is ran against the player. That's the simple definition, there's a lot more to it, of course 😉