What Argus does

Every anti-cheat on the market watches players. Argus watches the people who can already do anything: your staff. It scores what they do, explains why, and writes every judgement into a log that cannot be quietly rewritten afterwards.

Why a threat score instead of a log

Logging plugins produce thousands of lines nobody reads. By the time you grep for /give, the diamond blocks are already in a vault chest. Argus takes the opposite approach: every sensitive action feeds a weighted score from 0 to 100, rendered as a 1–5 star rating with a plain-language breakdown of what drove it.

The score is explainable, not machine-learned. When a member sits at four stars you can open the GUI and read the exact sentence — "spawned 3 stacks of netherite in creative while 1 other staff member was online" — that produced it. No black box, nothing to argue about.

Trust also regenerates. A member's score halves every scoring.half-life-hours (72 by default) of clean play, so one bad night does not brand somebody forever.

What Argus actually watches

Context matters as much as the action itself. The same /give weighs more at 03:00 with one other staff member online (off_hours) than it does during peak hours, and fifteen sensitive actions in two minutes trip the burst_activity signal regardless of what they were.

The tamper-evident audit log

Every recorded action is appended to a SHA-256 hash chain: each entry carries the hash of the one before it. Editing or deleting a line anywhere in the file breaks every hash after it, and /argus verify finds the exact entry where the chain snaps.

This is the difference between a log and evidence. A staff member with file access can delete a normal log and nobody is the wiser; they cannot silently repair a hash chain.

Investigation, not just detection

When something does trip, you need to reconstruct it. The Argus GUI gives you:

• an overview of every monitored member sorted by threat, with star heads
• a why breakdown — the individual signals and their contribution to the score
• a rewind timeline of that member's recent actions with inventory diffs
• inline actions: teleport, freeze, clear score, kick, refresh

Optionally, a self-hosted web panel serves the same profiles and audit entries in a browser. It runs inside the plugin — there is no cloud service, no subscription and nothing leaves your machine.

What Argus is not

• Not an anti-cheat. It has nothing to say about killaura or reach.
• Not a punishment system. It can freeze at a threshold and alert you; the decision stays yours.
• Not a cloud product. Everything runs on your server. MySQL is only used to share scores across a proxy network you already own.

Requirements

Next: install it.