PropertyGuard Regions and Permissions

I was curious exactly how PropertyGuard regioning worked with overlapping regions and with the "use" flag, so I ran some tests. Skip to the bottom if you just want the summary.

First, you can set your regions so that non-members can use or not use doors, trap doors, levers, buttons, and pressure plates (for the rest of the post I will just use the word "doors" to refer to all of these). To do so use "/region flag regionname use allow/deny" without the quotes. If a region is set to deny, non-members cannot use any doors. However, people added to the region can use them whether the use flag is set to deny or allow.

You are able to overlap your own regions and create regions within other regions that are yours. Unfortunately, there is no combination of flags and region membership that allows you to give use access to a person in a "child" region without giving them access to the "parent" region or to have build permissions in a child without access to the parent. This is bad news if you want to have a town with regioned plots. I tested this with every possible combination of regions and flags.

Summary:

Single Region:

• If the use flag is set to allow, anyone can use doors whether they are added to the region or not.
• If the use flag is set to deny then only people added to the region can use doors.

Overlapping Regions:

• If both regions have the use flag set to allow anyone can use doors.
• If both regions have the use flag set to deny, a person cannot use doors unless also added as a member to both regions.
• If a person is a member of one region and not the other, then the other region must have the use flag set to allow for the person to use doors in the overlapping area.
• If a person is added to a smaller region (like a town plot) inside of a larger region (a town), they cannot break/add blocks unless also members of the larger region (which makes the smaller region pointless).

Here are some specific examples to help you understand why this is important and what it means.
Let's say there's a town called Newbville. They don't want to allow town members access to the entire town because it's full of newbs who will inevitably break something (intentionally, accidentally, or both). From what I can figure out there is currently no way to give them a "town plot" that they can edit without giving them access to the entire town.

Let's also say that Newbville has an awesome mob grinder and wheat farm. The wheat farm is available to all town members, so you just set the use flag to deny and now no one can open the door to get into the wheat farm unless they are a town member (and have been added to the town region). But the mob grinder is only available to town members who have paid extra for access - so some members can use it and some can't. You can create a region around the grinder and set the use flag to deny. Only people who you add to that region will be able to open the door to the grinder.

 

You can overlap your own regions (I did it). You can't overlap other people's regions though. It looks like the bug that charges you for the region even though you don't get it is fixed though.

Would be an excellent President perk!

Non-staff do have access to some of the WG commands though - although I'm not sure of the logic behind the decisions on which ones we have and which ones we don't. I know for sure we can use WG commands to set the use flag. Setting other flags would be great (and especially child/parent regions). Is there any solid reason why a player cshouldn't have access to these commands for their own regions?

 

If it was cleaned up a bit, for sure.