How to Moderate Your Rust Server

The Players page is a live view of your server: who is on it, where they are standing, what they are typing, and every action you need to deal with them. It talks to your server over RCON, so you can moderate without launching Rust.

1Open the Players Page

• Log in to your game panel and click your Rust server.
• Click Players in the left menu under GAME SERVER.
• The strip along the top is the health of the server at a glance: players online, server FPS, entity count, memory, uptime and when it last saved.

• Live keeps it refreshing on its own. Turn it off if you would rather refresh by hand.

2Read the Player List

Each row carries more than a name.

• Steam ID, ping and time online are the basics.
• Account age and flags from Steam are the useful part: a VAC ban, a game ban, a brand new account or a private profile all show up here. Three fresh accounts joining together with private profiles is worth watching before anyone reports them.
• Health and the player's IP are shown for the same reason: two accounts on one IP is usually one person.

3Act on Someone

From a player row you can kick, ban, teleport to them, or give them an item.

Bans can be timed: permanent, an hour, six hours, a day, three days, a week or thirty days, with a reason. A first offence rarely needs to be permanent, and a day off is often enough to fix behaviour without losing a player. The Bans tab lists them and is where you lift one.

The Broadcast box at the top sends a message to everyone in chat, which is the polite thing to do before a restart or a wipe.

4Use the Live Map

• The Live map tab plots everyone on the world map as dots, with monuments labelled.
• Click a dot to select that player, and you can teleport to them from there.
• It is the fastest way to answer "where is this person and what are they near" when someone reports griefing.

5Watch Chat, and Let It Watch Itself

• The Chat tab is a running log with a filter, so you can find what was said without being online at the time.
• The Flagged tab is the one that saves you time. It collects messages matching your word list, and each one can be marked Kick, Ban or Handled. Scanning runs in the background every minute, so a flagged message is waiting for you rather than lost in the scrollback.

6Look Someone Up Later

• The History tab lists everyone ever seen on the server, with first and last seen, total playtime, session count and last known IP.
• Opening a player shows their moderation history, so "has this person been a problem before" is one click rather than a memory test.
• Staff notes live in that dialog: write what happened, and it is stored with your name and the date. Players with a note are marked in the list. This is the difference between a team that remembers and one where every admin starts from scratch.
• History is pruned automatically: flags older than 90 days and players unseen for a year are cleared out.

7Move a Ban List Between Servers

• The Bans tab exports to CSV and imports from a pasted list, reporting how many were imported, skipped and failed.
• If you run more than one server, this is how one ban covers both. It is also how you carry your list through a rebuild.

8Watch the Server's Health

• The Performance tab graphs players, server FPS, entities and memory over 6 hours, 24 hours or 7 days, with the peak for each.
• It is the fastest answer to "was it actually lagging at the time, or was it just them". See why your Rust server is lagging.

Good to Know

• The Server card is a shortcut hub. Map thumbnail, seed and size, in game time, Rust build, and a Save world now button. Use that before anything risky rather than hoping the autosave just ran.
• Some actions need the helper plugin. Viewing a player's inventory, stripping or healing them, teleporting to coordinates and monument labels on the map come from our VibePanel helper, installable with one button from the Plugins page. Everything else works without it.
• You can hand this out without handing over the server. Subusers can be given rust.players to look and rust.moderate to act, without any other access. See how to share access.
• Everything is logged. Moderation actions land in the panel's activity log, and in your Discord moderation channel if you have connected one. See Rust settings.
• The chat log depends on a setting. Log chat to console under Advanced in Rust settings is what feeds the Chat and Flagged tabs. Turn it off and both go quiet, with nothing here to explain why.

Finished

You can run your server from the panel. For the commands behind these buttons, and the ones with no button, see Rust admin commands.