I played for the first time in months yesterday. There are a lot of exciting additions to the game! Nevertheless, I don't have any time to even pretend to keep up with you guys, so I probably won't be playing it ... Until an actual story or quests, etc., is added to make it a bit more about playing and less about tedious building.

I don't even know how a "mob tower" works; I assume the Endermen mess it up somehow.

Endermen take damage from water, but I guess the water doesn't kill them fast enough to prevent them from picking up blocks.

I've updated the server to the latest version, which I think has a fix for the problem that kept killing the server (a StackOverflowError relating to transferring items in and out of dispensers and chests).

Update: I changed the design of the town's minecart dispenser, so it won't have any more stuck minecarts in the system (and as a bonus, lights an indicator torch when it's all out of minecarts), then went exploring. I like the new biomes, and I especially like that clay is no longer rare.

The only downside of the new biome generation code is where it meets the old generated biomes. In particular, I noticed a water biome that suddenly decided it was a mountain range. The new water level is 1 block lower, too, so there's a tiny wall of water on the border of old and new oceans.

Personally I've given up on trying to keep up with Minecraft. I'll play when it's officially released as a game. That is, something that you can call "beaten".

If simcity 4 is what a sandbox is like then I totally agree. I've almost completed building cities in a quarter of my region of Timbuktu. One of my cities has a population of ~250,000 sims. I called it Zoo York!

The first and last time I tried to connect to the new server (well, the server that went up after Baf's anyways) I got stuck in what I think was a starting area. It was a house that had doors, but they would not let me pass even when opened... I was unable to remove/break any blocks from the house to escape. That was really the last time I played (several months ago).

I've been playing Terraria in the meantime. I'll eventually play Minecraft again when Terraria becomes boring or when Minecraft is finally out of beta.

How do you make an area uneditable by other players? Is this a plugin, or is this built in to the server?

Well, the regular Minecraft server has some basic no-way-to-adjust-it-as-far-as-I-know spawn protection, which prevents changes to the area around the spawn point by anyone but ops.

If you use Bukkit, though, you can get the WorldGuard plugin, which lets you define regions, give those regions owners, set build permissions, and set other region properties (send a message when you enter/leave, allow/prevent mob spawning, disallow creeper explosions, etc.) ...
... which is a shame, because Bukkit hasn't been updated for Minecraft 1.8 yet.

I'm not sure, but probably yes. If they're set as the owner of a region, they should be able to adjust its flags. The command would be something like "/region flag <regionname> greeting Get off my lawn!"

I suspect you're playing one of the Minecraft beta versions.

I'm back at y=129 in the Nether again. Can you move me to 277, 115, 270 please?