Many (most?) FTB server packs include a mod called “FTB Utilities”, which offers chunkloading and chunk claiming. It is a very simple plugin that sort of does what GriefPrevention does much better.
It seems that FTBu was developed during that period of time of the last 3 years, after the Bukkit / Wolverness fiasco, where server admins were all illicitly using Prototik’s KCauldron fork because it was either that or shut everything down and close their communities, all while the official Cauldron website screamed “don’t use untrusted Cauldron forks, except we’re not giving you any more updates for 1.7.10 so just stop asking us” (heh), and Sponge for MC 1.8+ was still a skeletal prototype so it could not be used for anything actually useful… so FTBu was created by FTB Team, to fill the chunk protection void because it was either that or nothing.
We are now finally “over the hump” and Sponge is finally ready and plugins finally getting built and refined for it. So… do we still need FTBu?
What are other people running public FTB, er I mean Curse, er I mean Twitch, modpack servers with Sponge, doing with FTBu? Are you disabling it in favor of better designed Sponge plugins?
Use what you feel like using, they arn’t competing and we should aim to be compatible.
FTBu has nice UI, but feels really odd to me, and I havn’t battle tested it in real server scenarios.
Well, FTBu is weird in the regard that it is a true “mod” and runs on straight Forge servers without the Sponge API at all.
From my non-programmer perspective, it looks to me like there may be odd protection overlaps and gaps between it and what Sponge plugins are doing. Avoiding such pitfalls may be challenging.
Certain features of FTBu can be turned off while leaving the overall mod enabled, and then Sponge plugins used in place of it, but there still seems a high risk of things going haywire due to them both being “outside each other’s ecosystem”.
It is also unclear to me how much of a reliance FTB/Curse/Twitch has formed around using FTBu to do modpack easy/hard game mode/recipe switching, and if that all breaks down and fails in weird undefined ways if FTBu is completely disabled.
FTBU has actually quite a few features, not just chunk claiming, and I find it really useful, especially considering how many packs use it for their in-game wiki. Use it if you want it, don’t if you don’t.