Protecting objects in Terraria

I run a dedicated server for Terraria and have a bit of a problem lately with younger people (such as my brother or a friend's brother) playing and finding it hilarious to:

  1. Cheat and give themselves stacks of 999 Dynamite.
  2. Throw the dynamite into tunnels/houses/networks of both that take me >12 hours to make.
  3. Throw the dynamite into the ocean/caves etc which ruins the exploration value of the map.

This can at times be infuriating.

I've come across vague references to protecting stuff in Terraria - is this possible?

If so, is it something that I do through the server software or the game itself?

Edit:
Here is one such reference to 'protected' tiles: Unset spawn point on protected servers?


Since it was I who wrote the referenced question, I might as well shed some light on the topic here.

The protected servers I mentioned there are most likely TShock servers.
TShock is an alternative dedicated server for Terraria that adds in-game commands that enable, among other things, protection from griefing, spawning objects and enemies and privilege groups.

At the time I write this TShock is not stable for Terraria 1.1 yet, but in case you're interested you could have a look at TShock's website.


For an automatic backup, just write a simple batch script to copy world?.wld to another folder, then use Task Scheduler to run that once every day.

Edit: The world files are in My Documents/My Games/Terraria/worlds

Of course, this assumes you're using Windows. If not, I'm afraid I won't be as much help. Haven't been able to get Terraria running under Fedora :(