Introduction
Long ago, in a galaxy far far away, there was once a bukkit plugin called stats. And it was, alright. Then it went inactive, minecraft continued to update, and it became broken. And thus, BeardStat was born.
The only things stats and BeardStat share are their base goal (collate player stats) and sql storage format (done out of not wanting to lose data gathered by stats). BeardStat is written from the ground up. Today, it supports a wide array of activities in minecraft and collecting stats on them, an internal API for other plugin authors to use to provide stats, a web application to display stats alongside a feature rich configuration allowing you to tailor BeardStat to your needs.
One key advantage of BeardStat is it’s design towards being futureproof. Stat names for blocks, items and mobs are determined by the code, ensuring that even if it was not built for new version of minecraft/bukkit, it will record the correct stat name.
Another feature is custom stats, both persistent (saved to database) and transient (more useful for other plugins, such as BeardAch. These allow a server admin to generate stats based upon other stats (i.e. Kills – Deaths, creepers killed / gunpowder collected).