The mod Chat Heads has non-UUID based "heuristics" to detect player heads which works flawlessly even on servers with custom chat plugins. Implementing this could solve #2 .
Chat Heads is also open source though licensed under a GPL-like so I'm not sure you can directly copy the code but you can figure out exactly how this detection works to mimic it
The mod Chat Heads has non-UUID based "heuristics" to detect player heads which works flawlessly even on servers with custom chat plugins. Implementing this could solve #2 . Chat Heads is also open source though licensed under a GPL-like so I'm not sure you can directly copy the code but you can figure out exactly how this detection works to mimic it