Why not LogBlock, BigBrother, HawkEye, and so on?
GriefPrevention is 100% compatible with logging and rollback plugins. If you run GriefPrevention in addition to your rollback plugin, you'll have MANY fewer reports of problems to investigate. That will leave you with more time to focus on other things like your building projects and just having fun.
Having said that, I think that prevention is superior to "undo". If you're comfortable with telling your players that they're responsible for claiming their land, then you don't have to spend any time rolling back changes, and you can then remove your logging plugin and probably even drop your database.
Logging plugins, when they are the only anti grief installed on your server, have some major weaknesses.
Grief-reactive plugins like LogBlock usually involve a player submitting a ticket and waiting for investigation and resolution by an admin, who typically "rolls back" unwanted changes and bans the offender. This involves active participation on the part of administrators, and players lose valuable "fun time" while they first figure out how to ask for help, then wait for help to arrive. The changes may be undone, but the time spent by those players and administrators is gone forever, leaving the griefer a measure of success.
This also introduces the problem of selecting, training, and scheduling a team of active administrators, which is a whole different class of problem that you can't solve with a plugin. Consider that one bad admin can do more damage to your server's credibility than a team of griefers.
Database requirements aren't a problem often, but they do add challenge to initial setup, data backups, rare manual data edits, and the occassional server move.
When properly used by players, GriefPrevention prevents grief in the first place, so there's no need for a reporting mechanism and a team of admins waiting for grief to happen. And because data is stored right there on your server's hard drive, you can back it up by copying some files, move to another machine by the same method, make quick minor edits to data with a text editor (like Notepad), and there's zero additional setup. You literally just copy GriefPrevention.jar to your plugins folder and start the server.
All rollback plugins also have a huge exploit. Most administrators don't realize that there are websites and forums where stolen account credentials are openly shared. Griefers share those "stolen" accounts to cause trouble without being held accountable, and because there are so many servers out there, the real account owners usually never know their account is being used by others. Resourceful griefers exploit rollback as follows:
1. Find a chest with lots of phat lewt in it.
2. Log in on a throw-away stolen account.
3. Steal stuff from chest, and throw it on the ground somewhere inconspicuous.
4. Log in on "real" account and pick up the goods.
5. Victim reports theft.
6. Administrator investigates who stole the goods, bans the stolen account, and restores the goods to the chest.
7. Bad guy logs in with another stolen account and goes back to step 3. Now he's duplicating items, even better than x-ray!
If you want to keep the option open to roll back grief due to players failing to use GriefPrevention correctly, then you'll still need to a rollback plugin. However installing GriefPrevention as a supplement will drastically reduce the number of griefing incidents you have to respond to, and will make the above exploit more difficult to pull off (will only work with the rare unprotected chest).
