I'm aware I sound like a massive noob right now, but what is a whitelist? Is it a list of people allowed onto the server? If so, could I be added? My username is the same as this: FateOrFatality. Thanks.
Yeah, that's pretty much it. Hopefully one of the admins will see your post and add you. It sounds like a lot of people here just got Minecraft recently. I just picked it up last week myself.
A game like this really does need a whitelist system to prevent total chaos on the servers. I haven't tried any open servers yet (if there are any) but I can only imagine the headache of trying to do anything constructive on them.
Anyways, snow day so... lots of time for Minecraft.

Alright guys, which one of you set the forest east of the city on fire? My little outpost is not safe enough when there's a [censored] flaming forest right next to it...
It's possible this could have been caused by the environment itself. I've seen it happen in one of my offline saves. An above ground lava pool gets generated and sets the surrounding trees on fire. If it's a large enough forest, someone could have wandered too far in one direction and it could have spread into one of the common areas.
But it's probably more likely someone really likes fire.