How to ban players from your Minecraft server

Running a public Minecraft server, or any online community for that matter, is no simple task. Every community needs some set of rules or values to abide by, or else chaos will ensue. But what can you do when players break your server rules?

Well, one of the tools at your disposal, to deal with rulebreakers, is to use the ban hammer. When the ban hammer has spoken, a player will no longer be able to join your Minecraft server.

Banning players

To ban a player from your server, use the /ban <player> [reason] command, with as first argument the name of the player that you want to ban. The second argument and any following arguments are optional, and specify the reason of the ban.

For example:

/ban Steve
/ban Steve griefing
/ban Alex breaking rule #1

If a banned player is currently online, then they will be kicked from the server and be greeted with the ban reason. When a banned player attempts to join your Minecraft server, then they will be shown the ban reason.

Pardon

If, at any time, you decide that a player has been punished long enough, then you can pardon the player. To pardon a player use the /pardon <player> command.

For example:

/pardon Steve
/pardon Alex

Viewing bans

To view the list of currently banned players, use the /banlist command.

For example:

/banlist
/banlist players
/banlist ips

FAQ

How to issue a temporary ban?

The Vanilla Minecraft server unfortunately does not support issuing temporary bans. To use temporary bans you have to install a plugin that provides this capability, such as Essentials.

Where are banned players stored?

The banned players are stored in the banned-players.json file.