Players, bans and signs

Players

Everyone who has played this wipe, with session counts, time active, first and last seen, and whether they are online now. Click through to a player’s full profile for their name history and where else they have played.

Name history is the one moderators reach for most: the Steam ID never changes, so a player renaming themselves after causing trouble does not get a clean slate.

The table sorts on Player, Playtime, Sessions and Last seen — click a heading, and click it again to reverse it. A count above the table says how many played this wipe, and whether you are looking at all of them. Bans sorts the same way, on player, ban date, expiry and status, and Signs carries a count.

The combat log

Actions → Combat log on any player shows Rust’s own record of every PvP hit they landed or took this wipe: when, who, the weapon, the damage, the distance, where it hit, and their health before and after. Headshots, killing blows and hits on a sleeping player are marked.

This is the page for “is this person cheating”. It is worth being clear about what it can and cannot do:

It shows you the fight; it does not judge it. There is no cheat score and no “suspicious” flag, because there is no honest one to give — a 400m headshot is either a cheat or a very good player, and nothing in this data separates them. What it does is put the whole sequence in front of you instead of leaving you to guess from a kill feed.
A run of kills on a sleeping player is a raid, not PvP. They are tagged so you can tell at a glance.
Only PvP hits are recorded. Damage to buildings is not here — that is the raid timeline.

The verbs: kick, ban, mute and warn

All four are issued from the player’s row under Actions. Each is queued as a command and your server picks it up on its next 2-second poll, so it takes effect almost immediately.

Kick removes them now and does not ban them.

Ban is a native Rust ban — CerebRUST tells your server to ban, and the game enforces it. There is no separate CerebRUST ban list that could disagree with your server’s.

If you run several servers in one organisation, banning somebody on one bans them on all of them — a ban is a judgement about a person, not about one machine, and nobody wants to ban the same cheater five times. Lifting one lifts it everywhere too, so an unban is never half-done.

The confirmation tells you how many servers it reached.

However the ban was made. A ban typed into the F1 console, or banid in RCON, propagates the same way — CerebRUST notices it and applies it across the organisation. Somebody with console access to a server is at least as trusted as an admin on it, and a cheater banned by hand is no less banned. Unbanning by hand lifts it everywhere too.

It only ever covers servers you already reach. An owner or an admin bans across the whole organisation; a moderator bans on the servers they are assigned to, and no others. Banning is not a way round the assignments you made — if you want somebody banning network-wide, make them an admin.

⚠️ It stops at your organisation. Somebody else’s servers are never touched by your bans, and theirs never touch yours.

⚠️ Adding a server does not import its existing ban list. Propagation follows actions — a ban happening — not the ban list your server already had when CerebRUST first connected. Otherwise restarting a server would fan its whole history across your network. Bans made from then on propagate normally.

Mute stops them speaking without removing them. Rust has no mute of its own, so this one is CerebRUST’s: the plugin holds the muted list and applies it to global chat, team chat and the Rust+ companion app, so alt-tabbing to their phone is not a way round it. A muted player is told they are muted, why, and how long is left — somebody who does not know assumes the server is broken.

Warn sends them a message in game and records that it was delivered. They have to be online. If they are not, the warning fails rather than being recorded — a warning nobody read must not sit in their history as one you gave them.

Timed bans and mutes

Bans and mutes can be set for ten minutes, an hour, a day, a week, or permanently.

CerebRUST enforces the duration, not Rust. Rust’s own temporary bans are effectively permanent, so CerebRUST issues the unban itself when the time is up. Two useful consequences: a timed ban works even if your server is running an older plugin, and lifting one early in the dashboard stops it being unbanned again later. A timed mute is enforced twice on purpose — the plugin holds each mute’s expiry too, so it ends on time even if your server cannot reach CerebRUST at that moment.

Every action is recorded against the account that issued it.

Notes and flags

Actions → Notes & flags on any player is your server’s own record of them.

A note is free text: what happened, and what you decided. It is the thing you will want the next time that name comes up. Anyone with access to the server can write one; you can edit your own, and an admin can retire anybody’s. Retiring is soft — the note leaves the panel but the record survives, because a moderation record that can be made to have never existed is not a record. Nobody can rewrite somebody else’s words.

Flags are a short shared vocabulary — Watch, Reviewed — fine, Suspected cheating, Toxic, Advertising, Known alt, Trusted — so a flag means the same thing whoever set it.

Both are scoped to this server and are never shared with another one, including another server in the same organisation. If you run several, each keeps its own record.

Reviewed — fine does one extra thing: it removes that player from Worth watching and keeps them out until somebody clears the flag.

Showing players that moderation is fair

Rust admins are widely distrusted, and mostly for reasons that have nothing to do with you. Under Listing & Discord → Moderation transparency you can put the totals on your public server page: how many bans, kicks, mutes and warnings your staff issued this wipe — and how many they undid.

It is only ever totals. Never a list of who. Publishing names would mean a permanent, searchable accusation against a real person, made by an anonymous admin, with no appeal. That is not a thing CerebRUST will do, and there is no setting that turns it on.

The number that carries the point is lifted — actions a person looked at again and reversed. “14 bans, 2 overturned” says something about how a server is run that no competitor can show you. Actions applied automatically by a chat rule are counted separately, so the page never implies a person made a decision a rule made.

It is off by default, because it is your claim to make. When you turn it on you pick who can see it, using the same three choices as your public leaderboard: anyone, signed-in players, or players on this wipe.

Under about ten actions the page says so rather than implying a pattern — at three bans, one overturn moves the picture more than it should.

What a player sees about themselves

Any signed-in player can see their own record on your public server page: what your staff did, why, and where it stands now. Warnings show the exact words they were sent.

This is always available, whatever you set the totals to. A server choosing not to publish figures is not a server choosing that somebody may not see their own record — and an appeal against something you cannot see is not an appeal.

It never names the moderator who acted. They see what was done and why; who did it stays between your staff and the moderation log.

The moderation log

The Moderation log page is everything your team has done to a player on this server: who, what, to whom, when, why, and what became of it.

It is not the same as the command audit. That is a record of what was sent to your server; this is a record of what was decided, and it includes the things that were never commands — a ban expiring, a mute being lifted, a warning that failed to deliver.

Two columns are worth reading carefully:

Status — applied means your server confirmed it. queued means it has not yet. failed means it did not happen. expired and lifted mean it ended, either on its own or because somebody ended it. An action that failed and one that landed look completely different here, and they should.
By — a person’s name, or a chat rule when one of your chat rules acted automatically. The platform is never presented as a person.

The ban list

The Bans page mirrors your server’s actual ban list.

The game stays the source of truth. The plugin sends a full reconciliation shortly after startup and then reports individual bans and unbans as they happen — so bans you make in-game or through RCON show up here too, and unbans made while CerebRUST was offline are picked up rather than lingering.

Unbanning works the same way in reverse.

Signs

Every sign painted on the server, with the image, who painted it, where it is, and when.

This exists because signs are the one piece of user-generated content in Rust that you cannot moderate by reading chat logs, and “someone painted something vile at Bandit” is otherwise impossible to find. The gallery makes it a two-minute job.

Sign uploads are debounced by a few seconds, so a player iterating on a painting sends the finished article rather than every brush stroke.

Each sign carries its author’s name as a link to their profile, and Kick and Ban beside it, so you can deal with what you are looking at without going to find them on Players first. Both ask for an optional reason and both are queued to your server the same way as everywhere else — they apply within a few seconds.

Player reports

Under People → Reports. When a player presses F7 in game and reports somebody, that report reaches CerebRUST with the reporter, the target, the subject and the message — and now it lands in a queue your team can actually work through, instead of scrolling past in a Discord channel.

The counts matter more than the message

One person writing “PlayerX is cheating” is one person’s word. The same player named by four different people is something else entirely, and a reporter whose last nine reports all came to nothing is noise. So every report shows both:

How often this player has been reported this wipe, and how many of those are still open.
How the reporter’s own reports have gone — flagged only when at least half of three or more have been dismissed, so a new player’s first report is never held against them.

You will see counts, never percentages. “6 of 7 dismissed” and “86%” are the same number right up until the totals are 1 and 1, and only one of them is still honest there.

Closing a report

Every report is Open until somebody closes it, and there are two ways to close it:

Acted on it — you did something: a ban, a mute, a warning, a word in Discord.
Nothing in it — you looked and there was nothing there.

Both are one click and neither is styled as the recommended one. The split is the point: it is what lets your server show “14 reports this wipe, 9 acted on” on your public page, which is a claim your competitors cannot make. A single “closed” state would throw that away.

You can add a line about why when you close one. Keep it short — evidence belongs in a player note, which survives the wipe and sits on the player’s record where the next admin will find it.

Reopening puts a report back in the queue and keeps the note that closed it, so “closed and reopened” never looks like “never closed”.

Claiming

Click Claim to put your name on a report so nobody else works the same one. Click Put back to release it. Closing a report you had not claimed claims it for you automatically.

An admin can hand a report to a specific person; a moderator can only take one themselves.

What closing a report does not do

Closing a report writes nothing to the player’s moderation record. A report is somebody’s accusation, not a finding — if every dismissed report left a mark on the person named in it, being reported and being guilty would look identical on a player’s history. When you act on a report, the ban or mute you issue writes its own entry, as it always does.

Reports are scoped to the current wipe. A report about a base that no longer exists is not something anyone can act on, so previous wipes’ reports do not follow you into the new one.