Upgrading to WorldGuard 6

This is a major upgrade. However, it is relatively well-tested because many people have accidentally updated to version 6 when the Spigot team updated WorldGuard for 1.8 but did not update v5.9.

The version that you downloaded supports Minecraft 1.7.10 and 1.8.

NEW DOCUMENTATION: There is new work-in-progress documentation. However, refer to the older wiki for missing pages.

Downgrading to 5.9

When updating to v6, your region data will be updated to use player UUIDs rather than their names. That means that you cannot downgrade to WG 5.9 because it does not understand UUIDs and will remove all ownership data. However, you can use Six2Five to downgrade region data stored as YAML.

Remember to make backups.

If you do not use region protection, then downgrading requires no extra steps.

What's Changed?

There have been many changes, but the most important (and breaking ones) are listed below.

Region Protection

The region protection has been optimized and aggressive caching has been added. That means that the impact of region protection when hundreds or thousands of regions exist has been minimized.

Blacklist

Miscellaneous

Known Incompatibilities

Plugins that utilize WorldGuard's API may not work anymore. They may crash with errors. The API has changed somewhat.

Other Changes

The rest of the changes can be found in the CHANGELOG file.

In addition, there is new work-in-progress documentation that describes some of the new features.