We collect data about players and Minecraft servers in order to provide visualizations and other analytics, to improve the functionality of our plugins and to enable scientific research. Because your trust is vital to our success, we are open about what data we collect and what we do with it. We publish the source code for all of our plugins and will delete collected data upon request.
If you would like to use the collaboration plugins without contributing to our research, you can disable the logging and use them in offline mode. Instructions can be found in the Epilog user manual.
The collected data will be used for our scientific research focusing on collaboration, creativity, and education in games. With your permission, it may also be contributed to an open-access repository of anonymized data for research purposes. Server admins will have access to all data about their server. Use the options provided in the HeapCraft Dashboard to specify what we can and cannot do with your data.
All data and results we publish will be anonymized. We would never sell your data or reveal any sensitive information about you, your players, or your server without your explicit permission and will not use your data for anything besides academic research.
Some raw log data, visualizations and analytics we create from your data can be accessed by the admin of the respective server on the HeapCraft Dashboard. They are free to publish them as they find appropriate. Examples can be seen by using or demo account provided on the tools page.
If the Epilog plugin is installed, it records gameplay of all players to our logging server by default. The data includes player movement, block placing, mining and inventory content. The logging of chat messages can be disabled by the server admin. We don't log command arguments since they might contain passwords. Other plugins use Epilog to log additional data. If logging is disabled in the Epilog configuration, the logging is also disabled for our other collaboration plugins.
In addition to the logging of player data, Epilog polls our server periodically to provide us with plugin diagnostics and receive information about new updates. The plugin version published on Bukkit / Curse will use their servers for updates instead. Epilog also sends information about the Minecraft server every time it is loaded. The server information includes loaded worlds, installed plugins and a list of operators and banned players. This information is sent to us even if logging is disabled. Epilog can be put in offline mode to ensure none of the plugins are able to send us any data at all.
The Epilog technical details page has more information about what exactly is logged and provides example logging files and a way to send the data to your own server for evaluation.