AdminWatchdog

---

The problem this solves

You gave three people OP. One of them is quietly spawning diamond blocks into their own ender chest at 3 AM. You'd have no way to know, short of reading raw chat logs line by line, until a player screenshots it and posts it in your Discord asking why the economy is broken.

AdminWatchdog watches for that instead of you. It sits on your server, tracks what OPs and permission-holders actually do, and tells your Discord channel the moment it happens. It also just started keeping a searchable record, so "what did this person do last week" has a real answer instead of a shrug.

What's new in 1.4.3

Run /adminwatchdog history <player> and you'll see their last 10 tracked actions: commands, gamemode changes, creative-inventory grabs, item drops and pickups, all with timestamps. Ask for more and get up to 50.

Custom alerts also got a rate limit. If a player finds a pattern that triggers one of your Discord alerts, they used to be able to flood your channel just by repeating it. Now each player is capped at 5 triggers per 60 seconds by default, and both numbers are yours to change.

Full history at the bottom, under Changelog.

What it actually does

• Posts to Discord the moment a monitored player runs a command, switches gamemode, or takes something from creative
• Keeps a local, queryable record of all of it, so you're not restricted to whatever's still in Discord's scrollback
• Lets you write custom alert rules for specific commands, down to matching individual arguments
• Only watches the players you tell it to: OPs, specific permissions, everyone, or no one
• Lets trusted staff opt out entirely with a bypass permission

Screenshots

Discord messages

Creative inventory tracking

When someone takes items from creative mode, you get a Discord message showing exactly what they took:

Command alerts

Custom alerts

Set up special messages for important commands:

Gamemode changes

Features

Discord alerts

• Instant notifications in your Discord server
• Rich embeds with item pictures for creative-inventory events
• Ping specific roles for the commands you actually care about
• Works with any Discord channel through a plain webhook, no bot invite needed

Audit history (new in 1.4.3)

Every event AdminWatchdog tracks also gets written to a small local database. Pull it up any time with:

/adminwatchdog history Steve
/adminwatchdog history Steve 50

No Discord scrollback to dig through, no log file to grep. Old entries clean themselves up automatically after 30 days by default (configurable, or keep them forever).

What gets monitored

• Commands run by players
• Commands run from console
• Gamemode changes
• Items taken from creative inventory, dropped, or picked up by someone else

Who gets monitored

You choose:

• Only OPs
• Only players with specific permissions
• Everyone
• Nobody, until you decide otherwise

Trusted admins can get a bypass permission so they're left alone entirely.

Custom command alerts, with real pattern matching

Set up alerts for the commands you care about, matched down to specific arguments:

• ban: matches any ban command
• lp user: matches LuckPerms user subcommands
• lp user * permission set *: matches only when someone sets a permission
• give * * >=5: matches only gives of 5 or more items

Get pinged for the commands that matter and skip the ones that don't. And as of 1.4.3, a player can't flood your channel by spamming a command that matches one of these.

How to install

1. Download the plugin from the Downloads tab
2. Put the JAR file in your server's plugins folder
3. Restart your server
4. Edit plugins/AdminWatchdog/config.yml
5. Add your Discord webhook URL
6. Run /adminwatchdog reload

Setting up Discord

1. In Discord, go to your channel settings
2. Click "Integrations" then "Webhooks"
3. Create a new webhook
4. Copy the webhook URL
5. Paste it into config.yml

Configuration

Basic setup

discord:
  webhook-url: "YOUR_WEBHOOK_URL_HERE"
  enabled: true

Custom alerts

custom-responses:
  enabled: true

  player:
    # Alert when someone uses /ban
    ban: "**BAN** - %player% banned someone at %time%"

    # Alert and ping a role when someone uses /op
    op: "**CRITICAL** - %player% used OP! <@&YOUR_ROLE_ID> at %time%"

    # Alert for specific LuckPerms commands
    "lp user * permission set *": "**PERMISSION** - %player% set permission: %command%"

Rate limiting custom alerts

custom-responses:
  rate-limit:
    enabled: true
    max-triggers: 5
    window-seconds: 60

Audit history retention

logging:
  database-logging: true
  database-retention-days: 30 # set to 0 to keep everything forever

What the placeholders mean

• %player%: the player who ran the command
• %sender%: for console commands
• %command%: the full command they typed
• %time%: when it happened

Mentioning roles in Discord

To ping a role, you need the role ID. In Discord, type \@RoleName to get the ID, then use it like <@&123456789> in your config.

Commands

Command	What it does
/adminwatchdog or /aw	Shows plugin info
/adminwatchdog version	Shows version number
/adminwatchdog reload	Reloads the config
/adminwatchdog update	Checks for updates
/adminwatchdog history <player> [limit]	Shows a player's recent tracked actions (default 10, max 50)

Permissions

Permission	What it does	Who has it
adminwatchdog.reload	Lets you reload config	OPs only
adminwatchdog.monitor	Makes you get monitored	OPs only
adminwatchdog.history	Lets you view player history	OPs only
adminwatchdog.bypass.commands	Stops your commands being logged	Nobody
adminwatchdog.bypass.creative	Stops creative inventory being logged	Nobody
adminwatchdog.bypass.customresponses	Stops custom alerts for you	Nobody
adminwatchdog.bypass.gamemode	Stops gamemode changes being logged	Nobody

How to stop being monitored

Give yourself one of the bypass permissions. For example, if you don't want custom responses pinging you:

/lp user YourName permission set adminwatchdog.bypass.customresponses true

Questions people actually ask

Why not just read the server log? You can, if you enjoy grepping timestamps out of a flat text file at midnight. /adminwatchdog history gives you one player's actions, sorted by time, without the rest of the noise.

Will this slow my server down? No part of it runs on the main thread. Webhook calls, file writes, and database queries all happen off-thread, on Paper and on Folia.

Does it work on Folia? Yes, since 1.4.2. It also still runs fine on regular Paper.

Is the audit data sent anywhere? No. It's a local SQLite file in your plugin's data folder. Nothing leaves your server except what you explicitly send to your own Discord webhook.

Can I turn off the database and just use Discord? Yes. Set logging.database-logging: false and AdminWatchdog goes back to Discord-only, exactly like before 1.4.3.

Need help?

1. Check if someone already asked about your problem in Issues
2. Join the Discord server
3. Open a new issue on GitHub

Requirements

• Paper or Folia server
• Minecraft 1.20 or newer
• Java 21 or newer

License

This plugin has a proprietary license. You can use it on your server, but you cannot modify the code or redistribute it.

Changelog

1.4.3

• Added a local audit history you can query with /adminwatchdog history <player> [limit]
• Added rate limiting for custom-response Discord alerts, so a spammed trigger command can't flood your webhook
• Old audit entries expire automatically after 30 days by default (configurable)
• Config auto-migrates, existing installs pick up the new options on next start with no manual edits needed

Full history in the GitHub changelog.

---