It was a vanilla whitelisted server with a very tight knit community. Along with this change, it is now deciding to go public and is getting plugins for land claims and shit. Instantly went from something special to another shitty generic Minecraft server in the server lists.

Goddamnit, years of builds just down the drain. This is why I hate Minecraft servers. I just wanna build cool long term projects that'll last a long time :(

Edit: I joined the Chapo server, and one of the users on the Chapo server used to be a long time player of the server I just left. Very small world!