TotalFreedom

The background of the now defunct TotalFreedom forums

TotalFreedom was a Free-OP creative server, but in contrast to Kaboom the server had rules and much harsher restrictions. More commands were unavailable when compared to Kaboom, due to the server's usage of TotalFreedomMod.

It is a common misconception that Kaboom is a copy of TotalFreedom, or in some cases vice versa, however this is not the case. TotalFreedom is only 2 years older than Kaboom. But that's not to say there was no relation between the servers, as Scissors was developed in collaboration between both TotalFredom and Kaboom.

TotalFreedomMod

TotalFreedomMod was the plugin the server was built around. Instead of allowing server owners to configure groups of permission nodes and a permission plugin like LuckPerms, TotalFreedomMod instead had a hardcoded set of ranks.

These ranks imitated the behavior of groups & permission nodes by blocking most commands for low ranks. This meant that plugins had to be forked to be used with the rank system, as the majority of plugins understandably assume that players with OP should have all permissions.

The closest Kaboom equivalent would be Extras, although Extras is nowhere near as large in scope as TotalFreedomMod and is released under public domain, whereas TotalFreedomMod is licensed under an incredibly restrictive and likely unenforceable license.

Command blocking

Due to this approach not disallowing the usage of selectors in the arguments of vanilla commands, the majority of vanilla commands were blocked on the server.

Additionally, as TotalFreedomMod was incapable of searching for command aliases, all namespaced commands (i.e. minecraft:gamemode) were blocked.

The correct approach to block commands outright is commands.yml, which Kaboom currently does, and the correct approach to allow permissions for a subset of users is via permission nodes and a permission plugin.