Even with how many times the topic has been discussed over the lifetime of the project, the topic sometimes arises again and the answer is the same; no, the team will not support this.
###Why is this?
Well, let’s look at the reason we’ve always stated.
Take a look at how easily mods can manipulate Minecraft. The base game itself has no support for adding plugins to itself, so the community rewrites the code of the game to allow it to. MinecraftForge has a monopoly over mod APIs, being the most popular, and the code within a mod possesses the same powers that the game does over your computer. The most notable being, that its able to download files to your computer and execute whatever program it wants, being accessible executable code as per the notion of the mod loader.
####The biggest risk of implementing this is the idea of someone weaponizing this feature and throwing a malicious mod at everyone who comes onto the server.
###But there’s only a small few who would do that!
We can’t be expected to ignore such a big risk. Imagine running your own company with your own product; your users trust that your product is stable and safe to use. If the team allowed something like that to be implemented, they would be putting their users in danger of some no-gooder trying to steal all their cat photos or something. The idea behind Sponge is to recreate a plugin API that’s more versatile and improved, to try to start anew and take into account what we’ve learned from the last time someone created such a thing. Yes, that means Sponge will be full of features, yes that means we can be creative and try out new things, but, at all times, the priority is the safety of the end-user.
###Isn’t there a workaround?
Read the first section over. The first line of it, actually. Remember how I mentioned how easily mods can manipulate Minecraft? Regardless of how this is done, there’s always going to be a way around it because of how things are currently laid out. Even if we could do it, its more effort than its worth to try to make it work, and there’s always going to be a way around it.
This isn’t to say you can’t try to make something like this yourself. Just that the Sponge team won’t, and this decision has been made final since the first time it was discussed. If you do try to make it yourself, please consider the last 3 paragraphs and don’t put your users in danger.
