Staff permissions, one right at a time

First, which permissions do you mean?

There are two completely different things called permissions on a Minecraft server, and almost everybody means one of them while reading about the other.

Panel permissions, this page, decide who may open your control panel and what they may press there: the console, the files, the backups, the settings. They are about the machine and everything on it.

In game permissions decide what a player may do while playing: which commands they can run, which areas they can build in, which rank they hold. That is a plugin's job, and setting up ranks and groups has its own guide. Somebody can be an admin in game with no panel access at all, and somebody can have your whole panel without being anything special in the world.

All 15 rights, and what each one really covers

These are checkboxes, not tiers. Nothing here unlocks anything else, so you can grant exactly the one thing somebody needs and nothing next to it. Each right is also a tab in their panel, so what they may do and what they can see are the same list.

Two of them are not a tab. Delete files is split off from Files on purpose, so somebody can edit a config without being able to empty a folder. And the overview stays visible to everybody you invite, because it is read only: whether the server is up, how much memory it is using and the play address, nothing that can be pressed.

4 roles to start from

Most people think in roles rather than checkboxes, so there are 4 of them ready. They are starting points: pick one and then tick anything on or off, because a moderator on a survival server and a moderator on a creative one do not need the same things.

How to invite somebody

1. Open the Staff tab on your server

   It is one of the tabs in your own panel and only the owner sees it. A co-admin with every other right still does not, which is the whole point: nobody can widen their own access or bring in a friend.

2. Type their email address

   They do not need an account yet. The invitation is stored against the address rather than against a person, so it waits for them and attaches itself to their account the first time they sign in. Inviting yourself is refused, because a second row for the owner would grant nothing and confuse the list.

3. Pick a role, or tick the rights yourself

   Start from one of the 4 ready-made roles and adjust, or go straight to the 15 checkboxes. At least one right has to be ticked: an invitation that grants nothing is refused rather than quietly created, because a name in the list that can do nothing reads as access that exists.

4. Send it

   They get an email with a link to the panel. The access is the row in your staff list rather than the email, so a mail that bounces or lands in spam does not cost them the invitation; they can sign in and it is there.

What only you can do, ever

Two things cannot be handed to anybody, no matter how much you trust them, and both are the same reasoning. Managing staff is one: an account that can grant access can grant it to itself, and then a single leaked password is not one person's access but everybody's. So even a co-admin holding all 15 rights does not see the staff screen.

Billing is the other, and it is not in the server panel at all. Your subscription, your payment method and your invoices live in your own dashboard, which nobody you invite to a server ever reaches. Somebody can run your entire server without ever being able to change what you pay for it.

Changing your mind, and being reminded to

1. Change what somebody may do

   Tick a right on or off in their row and save. It applies immediately: a tab they no longer have disappears from their panel and the route behind it refuses them as well, so a page they left open does not keep working.

2. Take access away entirely

   Remove them from the list. Nothing they did is removed with them, because their actions stay in the Activity timeline with their name on them, which is exactly what you want the day you are trying to work out what happened.

3. Let the security check look over it

   The AI security check reads your staff list as part of a full pass: who holds a right that can destroy or expose something, which invitations have been sitting open, and who has not opened the panel in 3 months. It reports; you decide.

The three things the security check watches here

Handing out access is the easy part. The part everybody skips is looking at it again six months later, so the AI security check does that pass for you as part of a full run and reports what it finds.

It reports and it does not act. Removing a person or taking a right away is yours, on the Staff tab, because an assistant that can quietly revoke somebody's access is a different and much worse product. The full security check covers a lot more than the panel side.

Operators, the whitelist and bans, which are the other list

Everything above is who may open a tab. This is who may do something once they are in the game, and the two lists have nothing to do with each other: a co-admin with every panel right is not an operator, and an operator is not somebody who can see your files. The panel keeps all three of the in-game lists, operators, the whitelist and bans, on the Players tab.

What makes it worth its own paragraph is what happens when the server is off. Most panels simply refuse, because the usual way to op somebody is to type the command at a running server. Ours takes the other route and writes the file the server would have written itself, which means you can whitelist your friends the night before you open, with the machine switched off and nothing running.

That path is careful in three ways, because writing a file by hand is where this normally goes wrong. The name is looked up at Mojang first and turned into the account id the game actually keys on, so a typo comes back as a plain "no account by that name" instead of a line that quietly never matches anybody. Adding somebody twice does nothing rather than writing them in twice. And when the server is running we do not touch the file at all: the panel sends the real command instead, so what the running server holds in memory and what is on disk never drift apart. A change made while it is off takes effect the next time it starts.

Questions about staff access to your server

Where to find it

The Staff tab is in your own server panel, on every plan, with nothing to order and no per-user price. Every right on this page is a right the panel really hands out one at a time, and every refusal is one it really makes, so you can read the whole list before you invite anybody real. There is no public sandbox to try it in yet, so this list is the honest stand-in for one. Six questions will put one plan in front of you rather than a price list to work through on your own.

There is one thing your staff can do without a panel account at all. Link your Discord to the server and anyone with Manage Server there, or one role you point at yourself, can restart it with a command in your own channel. That is a way to hand out the one right people ask for at midnight without handing out a login for everything else, and it is described in full on the Discord bot page.

Answer six questions and get one plan Everything the panel does The AI security check on your server Ranks and groups inside the game Your play address, and adding more How the nightly backups work Restarting from Discord, without a panel login View plans and prices Ask us a question first

The 15 rights, the 4 roles, the 15 seats and the 5 rights the security check flags are read when this page is built from the same file the panel draws its checkboxes from. Written 31 August 2026.