SxStaff - Screenshare, Reports, Vanish

SxStaff is a staff toolkit for Minecraft servers, built around one idea: a ban is
only as good as what sits behind it. Freeze a player and their inventory is
photographed before they are told. Close a report and the chat that caused it is
already attached. Months later, the check is still on file with who ran it, how
long it took and how it ended.

It runs on Paper, Spigot, CraftBukkit, Purpur and Folia from the same jar, on
Minecraft 1.21 and newer. No database, no external services, no dependencies.


WHAT A CHECK LOOKS LIKE

The player is stopped and told exactly why. A title in the middle of the screen,
a countdown bar at the top, a panel on the right with the moderator's name and
the reason, and a clickable Discord invite in chat. Every one of those can be
turned off in the config if it collides with something you already run.

Four things happen in the first second. The inventory is photographed, before the
player is told anything, because the moment they know, the evidence starts
disappearing. Their movement is taken away. The Discord invite arrives as one
click rather than an address to copy while panicking. And staff are told, in game
and in Discord, with the reason and who started it.


THE HOLD

Most freeze plugins cancel the player's movement. The client has already drawn
the step when the server yanks it back, so the player sees themselves snap
backwards over and over. It reads as a broken server rather than as being held,
and the first thing anyone does about a broken server is reconnect.

SxStaff sets their speed to zero instead. Walk speed and fly speed go to zero,
with slowness and a negative jump boost covering what those two miss, because
jumping ignores walk speed entirely and fly speed is what matters in creative.
The client never draws the step, so there is nothing to snap back from.

A frozen player also cannot drop items or drag them out of a window, open any
container, craft, mount a horse or a boat, break or place blocks, eat, take or
deal damage, teleport, or run any command that is not on your allowlist.

Vehicles are worth naming. A player in one is moved by the vehicle, and the
server reports that as the vehicle moving rather than the player, so walk speed
never enters into it. Without blocking it, a frozen player could simply ride
away.

Logging out does not work either. There is a grace period first, because clients
crash and connections drop, and banning somebody for their internet is not
moderation. Come back inside the window and the check resumes with the time you
had left. Stay away and the punishment runs. Restarting the server does not help
them: checks are kept on disk.


THREE RECORDS, FOR THREE DIFFERENT MOMENTS

The inventory snapshot is for the appeal that arrives weeks later. It holds the
36 storage slots, armour, off-hand and ender chest exactly as they were when the
check began. It is read only, always, because a snapshot is a copy, so taking
anything out of one would create the item.

The chat and command buffer is for the report that reaches you five minutes too
late. It holds the last lines each player typed, and they are attached
automatically to every new report, so whoever reads it sees the incident rather
than one player's account of it. Commands on the ignore list never enter it,
which is what keeps login passwords out.

The check log is for the shift handover and for the question nobody can answer
six months on. Every finished check is recorded with who ran it, whom, when, how
long it took and which of four ways it ended: passed, failed, ran out of time, or
logged out. Two of those end in a ban and would be indistinguishable if only the
reason were kept, and an appeal turns on exactly that difference.


EVERYTHING ELSE

Player reports. Filed in one line. Staff get a list where each entry carries a
button to jump to the spot and a button to close it. The reported player is never
told.

Vanish. Silent join and quit, no item pickup, mobs ignore you, hidden from anyone
without permission to see staff. Every way a hidden moderator normally gives
themselves away.

Live inventory and ender chest. Watch items move as they happen. Editing is a
separate permission, checked on every click rather than at open time, so revoking
it closes off editing immediately.

Staff chat and two watch feeds, for commands and for sign text. Login and private
message commands are excluded by default.

Shared connection detection. Which accounts connect from the same place, stored
as salted hashes rather than addresses, so the file is useless if it leaks. Every
result says out loud that a shared connection is a lead and not proof, because
siblings, flatmates, schools and phone networks all look identical to an alt.

Staff notes. What the last shift knew about a player, shown the moment you call
them in. Notes are never edited, and deleting one is its own permission that
nobody holds by default.

Team numbers. Checks run and failed, reports closed and how quickly, per
moderator, per week. Counts, never a verdict.

One menu. /staff reaches all of it, drawing only the buttons the viewer has
permission to press. Every command still exists on its own, because typing beats
clicking once you know what you want.

Your own punishment plugin. SxStaff never bans anybody itself. It runs the
command you configure, so LiteBans, AdvancedBan, CMI, LibertyBans and the vanilla
ban list all work with nothing written for any of them.


DISCORD, WITHOUT A BOT

Paste a webhook URL and you are done. No bot to register, no token to guard, no
domain of your own, nothing to keep running.

Notifications arrive for checks started, passed and failed, for players who
logged out during one, and for every new report. Each can ping a role you choose.

There is also a live panel: one message in your channel that keeps itself up to
date with who is on duty, what is being checked and with how long left, and how
many reports are waiting. It works because Discord lets a webhook edit messages
it sent itself, so the panel is rewritten in place instead of reposted. Nothing
is sent when nothing changed, so a quiet server costs no requests at all.


PLATFORMS

Paper, Folia, Purpur, Spigot and CraftBukkit, each verified by actually running
the plugin on it, on Minecraft 1.21

Folia is the one that takes work. It splits the world across threads and the
scheduler every other plugin uses throws outright. SxStaff describes its work in
terms of what that work touches rather than which thread it wants, so nothing
needs configuring.

On plain CraftBukkit the report buttons and the clickable Discord invite are
printed as text instead, because the library behind clickable chat is bundled by
Spigot and not by CraftBukkit. Everything else is identical.

Mohist and Arclight are not claimed, because neither could be tested: Mohist
publishes no build for any 1.21 version, and Arclight's newest release fails to
start on its own with no plugins installed.


LANGUAGES

English and Russian ship with the plugin. Every line of text is in a file you can
edit, and anything a translation is missing falls back to English rather than
showing a raw key.