This suggestion may kind of suck, but, you decide. To prevent island farming, mods could do /dirtspy (like social spy) and if someone mines dirt/grass, mods will be alerted.
Example:

(From mod's view)

Player_a mined dirt block
Player_a mined dirt block
Player_a mined dirt block

 

The trouble with that is players are allowed legitimately to mine dirt Eg they have an island that has dirt that they own

 

But mods can tp. See what they're doing.

 

If there's someone who has a ton of dirt to move (say they're moving their farm or something), the mod's chat will be full of messages notifying them that someone is mining dirt blocks. Will there a way for the mod(s) to turn this off after they've looked at what's happening?

 

No support. This is a super complicated solution. Just let the mods be notified of someone does /new island replace multiple times in a certain timespan.

 

Too much spam for the mods, their chat already goes 2x faster than a normal player's.

 

No support, reasons see above.

 

No support, although I see your point. It would just be a bigger hassle for our current moderators.

 

You collect about 32+ dirt every island. More players join everyday, more than a quarter of the player restart their islands.
The spam would be immense. At least someone is mining a dirt block every second. 1/500+ people :3

 

Just bring logblock back. ;p

 

You can turn it off xD.

 

No support, it would spam the mods feed way to much :/

 

What if people are picking up dirt while fixing their farm? Would that be alerted as well?

 

Yeah, there are a lot of flaws xD

 

No support.

 

No support.

 

The spam e-e
No, but if logblock was added back we can do that anyway with /lb lookup

 

Logblock should be added back. .-.

 

The idea could be touched up. Instead of every block, it could notify you if someone has broken a suspicious amount of dirt. I'm not sure exactly how much dirt can be collected from a single island, but I think someone said 32 somewhere above. Assuming this is true, 32 * 1.5 (the amount of dirt from one island, and halfway through a second one) could be the notification threshold.

While very clunky, this could be a temporary fix until a much better solution is deployed, which would just be to save a timestamp along with every island's data, that is, the date the island was created. When someone runs /newisland replace, check their timestamp and if it's less than, say, 1 week ago, don't let them create a new island.

Or just clear their inventory when they make a new island.