Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-32325302-20170713105530

You trust someone, you add them to the Whitelist for your banner-protected area... you come back online, and find that they've replaced your banners with their own and in essence, taken over your claim. How does this happen? It happens when the player you trusted breaks the block under the banner, which breaks the banner, which removes your protection... allowing them to replace with their own, because trusted players have block-breakage perms.

Proposed solution: make Claiming Banners (as opposed to banners used simply for decoration) craftable:

You go into the faction's crafting table and make your banner. Then you take that banner and the block you want to place it on (bronze, silver, or gold) and put both into the same crafting table. The result is a banner-on-a-block (named Claim Banner), a single piece item, that cannot be broken by anyone except the owner (or persons with server perms like server owner, admins, etc.) so long as its self-protection is enabled on the Claim Banner.

This allows players you've claim-whitelisted (or players in your Faction, if Faction is the protection you choose in GUI) normal perms (break/place blocks, open gates and chests, etc.) but prevents them from breaking the banner by breaking the block under the banner (which is a loophole in the current banner claim system).

"But what if I first made this Claim Banner with a bronze block, and now I want to upgrade it to gold?" you may ask.

Simple: break and remove your Claim Banner block with your pickaxe. Once it's in inventory, take it to the faction's crafting table: placing in the table converts it back to 1 bronze block and 1 banner; you remove them from the table, then place the banner and a gold block in, and it creates the Gold Claim Banner block.

Alternately, if it's too much difficulty for the development team to set this up with the crafting tables to undo a Claim Banner block, it could be enabled as an action in an Unsmeltery.

I would use names "Bronze (Faction Name) Claim Banner," "Silver (Faction Name) Claim Banner," "Gold (Faction Name) Claim Banner" in the item descriptions so that players can easily see which is what in inventory, before placing. Perhaps the icon imagery for a Claim Banner could also show a block over bottom of banner, further differentiating it from a decoration banner in inventory. I think it's crucial, though, that they be named (and separated in inventory) by type---bronze, silver, gold---so as to avoid the annoyance of placing and breaking umpteen different Claim Banners in inventory till you find the type you want. Normal Banners would still simply be "Banner" (of whatever faction); the only ones usable for creating claims would be Claim Banners. 