I'm following the tactic suggested in #208 and opening a new issue.

Fans have become a real nuisance on our server ever since Direwolf20's Forgecraft series (and other youtubers/streamers) made them popular for Cursed Earth (from Extra Utilities) mob grinders. They would be a lot more pleasant for both players and admins if fans could at least be turned off with redstone signals. Right now a user can easily get into a situation that they cannot fix without trashing all their work with a BuildCraft Filler to clear them out and starting over. Admins aren't much help either since fans affect creative mode players, go through walls, etc.

If making fans respond to redstone is too difficult/bothersome to implement, and so is making fans ignore creative players, maybe there can be an op command that stops/resumes all fans on the server?

I'll look into this for 1.2.6. It's likely I'll have them disable when there's a redstone signal.

It seems that a037aa3 + 9ad3b5b fully address this issue, so closing. Thanks a bunch!