Guides5 min read
Whitelists, roles and permissions without a spreadsheet
How to give people exactly the access they need, why operator status is not a permission system, and the setup that survives a community growing.
Operator is not a role. It is total control, including the ability to stop the server and edit the world, and handing it out because somebody needed to change the time of day is how servers get wrecked by people who meant well.
Groups, then permissions, then people
Define a small number of groups, give each the specific commands it needs, and put people in groups. It takes twenty minutes once and saves you from a list of individual exceptions nobody can audit six months later.
- Default: play the game, nothing more.
- Trusted: the handful of quality-of-life commands you are happy to be used unsupervised.
- Moderator: kick, mute, ban, and the ability to see who did what.
- Administrator: everything, and as few people as possible.
The whitelist is the cheapest moderation there is
A whitelisted server has no griefing problem, because it has no strangers. For a server run for friends, that single setting replaces most of the plugin list people install instead.