MCRank Spring 2026 Release Notes: Monetization, the MCRank Plugin, Networks & Trust

It has been about 12 weeks since our Early 2026 release notes, and this is by far our biggest update yet — 89 commits across server monetization, the official MCRank plugin, full Minecraft network support, a community flagging system, deep performance work, and an enormous amount of player and owner-facing polish.

If you only have 30 seconds, here's what's new:

🎁 Server Reward Tiers & Donations — accept donations, deliver rewards in‑game, donor leaderboards, monthly donation goals
✨ Featured Server Listings — premium placement starting at $5
🔌 MCRank Plugin v1.3.0 — Paper & Velocity builds, performance metrics, reward delivery, auto‑update, admin fleet view
🌐 Networks & Hub Listings — proper support for multi‑server networks, parent‑hub player counts, dedicated node pages, public networks page
🚩 Community Flagging System — players can now report problematic listings
📦 45‑day Offline Archival — long‑dead servers no longer pollute the rankings
📡 In‑house Votifier client & self‑hosted avatars — fewer third parties, faster pings, better privacy

Grab a coffee. Let's dig in. ⛏️

🎁 Server Reward Tiers & Donations

Running a Minecraft server is not cheap. Hosting, DDoS protection, plugin licenses, build contests, your time — none of it is free. Most owners hit the same wall: "I want to accept donations, but I don't want to run my own Tebex/BuyCraft store, build a webhook bridge, or risk becoming pay‑to‑win."

That's exactly what the new MCRank Rewards system is for.

What you get

Reward tiers — Configure $5 / $10 / $25 (or any amount) bundles directly on your MCRank server page, one‑time or recurring.
Stripe Checkout — Donors pay with card, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. Stripe handles PCI compliance, receipts, refunds and fraud screening.
Automatic in‑game delivery — When a payment clears, the MCRank plugin gets a signed event on its existing heartbeat channel. Your configured reward commands run automatically as if the donor had voted. No webhook plumbing required.
Donor leaderboard — Optional public recognition for top supporters on your server page.
Monthly donation goals — Crowdfund a new game mode, a bigger box, or a build contest with a public progress bar on your server page.
Hub network routing — On Velocity hubs, rewards delivered to the parent hub are correctly routed to the child server the player is currently on.

EULA‑safe by design

The reward tier templates ship with cosmetic‑only defaults: particle effects, chat prefixes, custom join messages, a fancier /me chat name, cosmetic pets. You're free to configure whatever you want — but the example commands and the marketing copy steer hard toward perks that don't trip Mojang's Commercial Usage Guidelines.

What it costs

MCRank takes a flat 5% platform fee per transaction. Stripe charges its standard ~2.9% + $0.30 processing fee on top. Payouts go directly to your connected Stripe account on Stripe's normal schedule — no invoicing, no monthly minimums, no MCRank account balance to drain.

Set it up

Connect Stripe in your server dashboard
Create reward tiers
Install the MCRank plugin if you haven't already.
Toggle the donor leaderboard and donation goal on or off.

For more info about rewards, check: mcrank.com/rewards.

✨ Featured Server Listings

The hardest moment for any Minecraft server is the launch — the period between the server is ready and the first 50 regulars show up. Even the most polished build feels empty when the player count is zero.

Featured listings are MCRank's answer.

Where featured servers appear

Homepage featured strip — top of mcrank.com, above the leaderboard.
Search results — pinned to the top of relevant tag and search pages.
Top, Rising Stars, Hidden Gems, and New Servers — featured slot at the top of every directory.
Landing pages — version, platform, country, and tag pages all get local featured slots, so a German server isn't competing against a US‑only audience.

You also get a gold Featured badge on your card and a featured‑specific analytics view that breaks out the lift in page views, votes, and click‑throughs from the day you go featured.

Pricing

Plan	Price	Best for
One‑time	$5 / 30 days	Launches, content drops, one‑off promo windows
Monthly	$5 / month	Steady reach, cancel anytime
Annual	$54 / year	10% off — for servers committing to growth

Why it's not pay‑to‑rank

Featured listings are a placement boost, not a ranking boost. Your global rank, votes, and review scores are unaffected. The slot exists alongside the algorithmic rankings and is clearly labeled "Featured." Players see exactly what's promoted and what's earned.

Get featured: mcrank.com/featured-servers.

💸 Support MCRank Directly

If you'd rather support MCRank itself instead of (or in addition to) a specific server, the new /sponsor page lets you make one‑time or recurring donations directly to the platform. Custom amounts, optional donor name, website, and message — and an anonymous option for the shy.

📊 My Subscriptions Dashboard

The new https://mcrank.com/dashboard/subscriptions page is where players manage everything they've bought across MCRank in one place:

Active reward tier subscriptions (server, tier, price, renewal date)
One‑time reward purchases and their fulfillment status
Recurring platform donations
A Minecraft UUID linking flow so the plugin can match Stripe entitlements to your in‑game identity
One‑click cancellation for any recurring item

🔌 The Official MCRank Plugin

Probably the single biggest piece of work in this release. The MCRank plugin started the year as a stats/heartbeat experiment and is now a fully‑featured server integration with Paper and Velocity builds, real‑time performance metrics, reward delivery, auto‑update awareness, and an admin fleet dashboard.

🔑 API keys & account linking

Server owners now generate scoped API keys from server edit page -> plugin. The plugin uses those keys to authenticate every call back to MCRank — meaning your plugin install is tied to your actual server listing, not just an IP/port guess. Scopes include rewards:read, so you can issue narrow keys for specific integrations.

🌐 Velocity proxy support (v1.2.0)

If you run a Velocity‑based network with multiple sub‑servers, the plugin now ships as a multi‑module Maven build with a dedicated mcrank-velocity JAR alongside the Paper one.

Network‑level Plugin_network_handshake and Plugin_network_heartbeat endpoints aggregate player counts, playtime, and rewards across your whole network — so players who hop between lobby and games stop getting double‑counted.
Sub‑server attribution — if your lobby is lobby-1 and your survival server is survival-3, per‑server playtime flows up correctly to a single network dashboard.
The plugin survives the wrong JAR being dropped into the wrong server type with friendly "wrong‑jar" shims that explain the mistake instead of crashing.

📈 JVM / Bukkit performance metrics (v1.3.0)

The newest plugin release adds a server health panel to your server's owner‑only dashboard:

TPS (1m / 5m / 15m moving averages)
Tick duration percentiles
JVM memory usage (heap, allocated, max)
CPU and thread counts
Per‑world entity, chunk and player counts

These metrics are pushed on the existing heartbeat channel and are visible only to the server owner — no leaking your TPS to competitors.

🎁 Reward delivery

When a donor checks out on MCRank, the plugin receives a signed delivery event on the same heartbeat channel it already uses. You configure your reward commands once in config.yml:

rewards:
  enabled: true
  tiers:
    starter:
      commands:
        - 'lp user %player% permission set group.donor'
        - 'tell %player% Thank you for supporting the server!'

Players get their perks in‑game on the next heartbeat, without you doing anything.

🔄 Auto‑update awareness & manifest

Every plugin install pings Plugin_checkUpdate and Plugin_manifest to learn:

Whether a newer version exists
The download URL and SHA‑256 checksum of the JAR
Release notes for the current and target version

The plugin tells you in console when an update exists. We deliberately kept manual download as the default — but the foundation is in place for opt‑in auto‑updates.

🛠️ /mcrank reload

The new /mcrank reload console command (v1.1.0+) lets you re‑load configuration and re‑authenticate against MCRank without restarting the whole server.

🌐 Networks & Hub Server Support

Multi‑server networks have been a second‑class citizen on MCRank for too long. This release fixes that.

What's new

Networks marketing page with a type=network directory filter for finding multi‑server communities specifically.
Hub listings — you can now register your Velocity/Bungee proxy as a parent hub and attach individual game servers as child nodes.
Fully functional paper‑node detail pages — each child node has its own server page, with parent‑hub join info preserved across navigation.
Hub player counts in the QuickJoin banner — when you visit a node page, we show the aggregate network player count so you know how lively the broader network is, not just one box.
SSR fixes — parent hub join info is preserved during server‑side render hydration of network node pages, so the address you copy is always the right one.
Network nodes are excluded from the "Latest Servers" homepage feed so a big network adding 12 game servers in one go doesn't drown out genuinely new listings.

🚩 Community Flagging System

MCRank gets bigger every month, and as the directory grows so does the surface area for stuff that doesn't belong: dead servers still listed as online, plagiarized descriptions, screenshot abuse, P2W servers misrepresenting their economy, the occasional outright scam.

We can't moderate that alone. So we built a community flagging system — transparent, fair, and rate‑limited against abuse.

For players

On every server page (and on reviews, gallery images, blog posts and player profiles) a new 🚩 Report button lets you flag content as:

Misleading information — fake gamemodes, fake player counts, false uptime claims
Broken / dead server — unreachable for weeks but still listed
Plagiarized content — screenshots or descriptions lifted from another listing
EULA violation — pay‑to‑win mechanics misrepresented as cosmetics
Harassment / spam / abuse
Other — free‑text for anything else

Pick a category, optionally add detail, submit. That's it.

For server owners

If someone flags your server, you'll see it in your dashboard with the category and any submitted detail, plus a respond/appeal flow and a full audit trail of every status change. We never auto‑take‑down a server based on flags alone — they inform the moderation team, they don't bypass it.

For abusers

Repeated flagging from the same account is rate‑limited. Mass‑flagging (the favorite tactic of salty competitors) trips automatic anomaly detection rather than triggering action against the target.

📦 45‑day Offline Server Archival

Servers that have been offline for 45 consecutive days are now automatically archived. Archived servers:

Drop out of all rankings and directories
Stop accumulating "offline" badge clutter
Can be un‑archived in one click by the owner if the server comes back up
Retain their full history, votes, reviews, and gallery — nothing is deleted

This keeps the rankings honest without punishing servers that come back from a long break.

🗣️ Owner‑Managed Alert Banners

Server owners can now post a persistent alert banner to the top of their server page and vote page — perfect for "We're moving to 1.21.5 on Saturday!" or "Maintenance from 2–4pm EST today."

Configurable from your server edit page
Shown on both the main server page and the server vote page

📡 In‑House Votifier Client

We replaced our dependency on mcstatus.io for Votifier with an in‑house Votifier v1 + v2 client. The result:

Faster vote callbacks
Fewer points of failure
Better error reporting to server owners when their Votifier config is wrong
The Vote button now hides itself on cards when a server hasn't configured Votifier at all, so players don't get redirected to a dead vote flow

🧑‍🎨 Self‑Hosted Player Avatars

Player avatars have been migrated from mc‑heads.net to a self‑hosted /api/avatar endpoint. This means:

One less third‑party request per player on every page
Cached responses for faster repeat loads
Graceful fallback when a username lookup misses (no more crashes on null UUIDs)
Better privacy — your players' usernames don't leak to a third‑party CDN

📡 Public Developer API & Docs

The /developers page is now a proper developer portal with formal docs for every Plugin API endpoint:

Example request and response payloads
Rate limits per endpoint
The full handshake / heartbeat flow diagram
Auth model (API keys + scopes)

If you're integrating MCRank from your own bot, dashboard, or website, that's now your one‑stop reference.

🧭 SEO Landing Pages

Every Minecraft version and platform now has its own dedicated landing page with schema markup and full SSR. We finally killed Core Web Vitals CLS and LCP issues:

Self‑hosted font‑face declarations (no more render‑blocking Google Fonts request)
Eliminated the font opacity flash
Fixed conditional‑rendering CLS on the homepage
Closed mobile menu now correctly marked inert for accessibility
Improved footer color contrast for WCAG AA

The April 2026 Core Web Vitals report showed mcrank.com hitting "Good" on all three vitals across Mobile and Desktop. 🎉

🎨 Server Page Polish

The server detail page got a top‑to‑bottom UX pass:

Icon‑only action buttons in the header for a cleaner look on desktop
Verified badge moved into the tags row as the first chip
Consistent action buttons on mobile (favorite, flag, edit all the same size)
Header polish with a fixed duplicate edition emoji
Responsive ServerCard header and full‑width hero banner sized to the correct 936×120 aspect ratio so banners stop getting cropped
Edition‑specific address copy in the mobile action bar now respects the port
Branding tab — website and Discord URLs can now be saved from a dedicated Branding tab in the server edit page
YouTube embed Error 153 fixed (server descriptions can embed YouTube videos again)
rank=0 falsy render bug fixed — unranked servers no longer display "Rank 0"

🐛 Notable Bug Fixes

Fixed favorite button sizing to match flag/edit buttons on the server page
Fixed SSR hydration losing parent‑hub join info on network node pages
Fixed donation attribution so logged‑in donors are linked to their profile
Fixed plugin update check showing "(?)" and stale handshake timestamps
Fixed plugin Paper module's ambiguous runTask reference
Fixed dynamic import in notifications service dropping .js extension
Fixed plugin API session leftAt being required when Gson strips null values
Fixed Servers.updateInfo rejecting valid updates with a null language
Fixed Stripe Connect subscription cancels being mis‑scoped across servers
Reconciled webhook event drift between MCRank and Stripe
Avatar API no longer crashes when a username lookup returns a null UUID

⚖️ Legal: Stripe Connect

With donations and reward tiers live, our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service were updated with a new Stripe Connect payments section covering data sharing with Stripe, payout flows, and refund handling. If you're a server owner accepting payments, the new clauses apply to you — give them a read at /privacy and /terms-and-conditions.

🔢 By the Numbers

89 commits since the Feb 24 release notes
2 plugin builds (Paper + Velocity) now shipping from a single multi‑module Maven repo
5% platform fee on monetization (everything else flows to the server owner)

🙏 Thank You!

If you've voted, listed a server, uploaded a screenshot, filed a feature request, or just hung out in our Discord — thank you. We're still in beta. We're still shipping fast. And there's a lot more coming.

Have questions or suggestions? Join our Discord community or drop a request on /feature-requests.

Happy crafting! ⛏️

— The MCRank Team