Admin Menu

The Admin menu is where every tool that only your staff team should touch now lives. Freezing somebody, carrying them somewhere, wiping stray vehicles, talking to the whole server, and pushing a permission refresh are all here, in one place, instead of scattered around the rest of vMenu.

It sits near the top of the main menu, right under Staff Alerts.

Nobody sees it unless you let them

The Admin menu is hidden, not locked. A player without the permission does not see a greyed out row telling them the server has staff tools, they simply have no Admin row at all. Every option inside it works the same way, so a staff member who only has some of the permissions sees only the tools they can actually use.

To give somebody access, grant them the permission for the menu itself plus whichever tools you want them to have. See Permissions below.

What is in it

Players

Freeze Closest Player pins whoever is standing nearest to you to the spot. They cannot walk, run, or drive off. Press it again while stood next to the same person and they are released.

The freeze survives them dying and respawning, and survives them changing character, so somebody cannot wriggle out of it by taking a nap. It is lifted automatically if vMenu is restarted, so nobody is ever left stuck by an accident on your end.

Grab Closest Player picks the nearest person up and carries them in front of you, facing the same way you are. They come along wherever you go, and they cannot break free on their own, so remember to put them down again. The button changes to Release Player while you are carrying somebody, and releasing works no matter how far away they have ended up.

Only the staff member who picked somebody up can put them down. If two of you reach for the same person, the second one is told they are already being carried. If the person carrying them disconnects, whoever they were carrying is released straight away rather than being left attached to somebody who is no longer there.

“Closest” means the closest player your game actually knows about. On a busy server your game is only told about people near you, so this finds somebody standing in front of you, not somebody on the other side of the map. How far it reaches is set by vMenu.Enhanced.Admin.ClosestPlayerRange, which defaults to 5 metres and can go up to 15.

Return To The Default World puts you back in the main routing bucket, for when you teleported to someone who was in a different bucket.

Show Players In NoClip is the same option that used to live in Miscellaneous Settings. It keeps showing the blip and the name of anybody flying around in noclip, who everybody else has them hidden from.

Vehicles

Delete Vehicle removes the vehicle in front of you, or the one you are sat in, whether you are driving it or only a passenger.

This is the wider version. Ordinary players with the Vehicle Options delete button can only delete a vehicle they are actually driving, which is a change from how it used to behave. See The /dv command below.

Delete Empty Vehicles clears up after a busy night, when the map is covered in cars people spawned and walked away from. It leaves two things alone:

• Anything with somebody in it. Driver or passenger, player or NPC. If a person is sat in it, it stays.
• The map’s own traffic. Parked cars, passing traffic, police patrols and anything else the game spawns for itself are not touched. Wiping those empties the streets for everybody, and the game only spawns them straight back.

So what actually goes is the vehicles scripts put there and nobody is using, which is what you wanted gone.

Delete All Vehicles means all of them. Occupied ones, ambient traffic, parked cars, the lot. It yanks drivers out of moving cars everywhere at once and strips the streets bare until the game refills them. Both buttons ask you to press a second time before they do anything, but this is the one to be careful with.

Server

Clear Area tidies the world around you. Wrecks, dropped props, wandering people, scorch marks, dirt and broken street lights all go back to how they started. This one is not only for you: everybody standing near you gets the same patch of world cleaned up at the same moment. How far it reaches is set by vMenu.Enhanced.Admin.ClearAreaRadius, which defaults to 100 metres.

This option used to live in Miscellaneous Settings.

Send Announcement puts a message on the screen of everybody on the server, wherever they happen to be. It uses the same banner as a staff alert, in blue rather than amber and headed ANNOUNCEMENT, so nobody mistakes the server talking for a player asking for help.

Scheduled Announcements is where announcements that send themselves live. See announcements.json below.

Refresh All Permissions sends everybody on the server a fresh copy of what they are allowed to do. See Refreshing permissions.

The /dv command

/dv deletes a vehicle without opening the menu. What it can reach now depends on what you are allowed to do.

What you hold	What /dv deletes
...VehicleOptions.DeleteVehicle	Only the vehicle you are driving. Being a passenger is not enough.
...Admin.DeleteVehicle	The vehicle in front of you, or the one you are sat in, driving or not.

You do not have to pick. If you hold both, /dv quietly uses the wider one. If you hold neither, the command is not registered for you at all.

The Delete Vehicle button in Vehicle Options follows the first row: it now refuses unless you are in the driver seat. The one on the Admin menu follows the second.

/dv only exists while vMenu.Enhanced.VehicleOptions.DeleteVehicleCommand is turned on in your configuration.cfg. That has not changed.

Refreshing permissions

First, a thing worth knowing: editing permissions.cfg on its own changes nothing. The server does not watch that file. It only knows what it was told, so a permission moves when you actually tell it, either by re executing the file with exec or by running the add_ace, remove_ace, add_principal and remove_principal commands in the console.

Once the server does know, it enforces the new answer immediately. Each player’s copy of vMenu does not, because it keeps its own list of what it is allowed to do and only asks for that list once, when they join.

Refreshing hands them a new list. There are three ways to do it.

For everybody, from the menu. Admin menu, Refresh All Permissions. It tells you how many players it reached.

For one player, from the menu. Online Players, pick a player, Refresh Permissions. Handy when you have just promoted one person and do not want to bother everybody else.

From the server console.

vmenu_refresh_permissions

with no argument refreshes everybody, exactly as it always has. Add a server id to refresh just that one player:

vmenu_refresh_permissions 42

If nobody on the server has that id, the console says so rather than quietly doing nothing.

None of this is needed for the server to enforce a permission. The server checks the real thing every single time, so a permission you take away stops working immediately whether or not anybody refreshes. Refreshing is about the menu the player is looking at catching up.

announcements.json

Announcements can send themselves, either every so many minutes or at a set time of day. They live in a file next to your other vMenu config:

resources/vMenu.Enhanced/config/announcements.json

The file ships with everything commented out, so a fresh server announces nothing at all until you decide otherwise. Take the // off the lines of one of the examples to switch it on, or write your own.

What an announcement takes

Field	What it does
name	A short label so you can find it again in the menu. Players never see this.
text	What everybody actually sees. Written exactly as you type it, never translated.
everyMinutes	Send it this often, counting from when the server started. Between 1 and 1440.
at	Send it at this time of day instead, written as HH:MM on a 24 hour clock.
clock	Only used with at. See below. Leave it out and you get real.

Use either everyMinutes or at on one announcement, never both. An announcement with neither is skipped, and the server console says which one and why.

Real time or game time

clock picks which clock the announcement measures itself against, and it applies to everyMinutes and at alike.

"real" is the real world. everyMinutes: 30 is half an hour, and at: "20:00" is eight in the evening where the machine your server runs on thinks it is. This is the one you want for restart warnings and anything tied to your community’s evening.

"game" is the clock inside GTA, which runs much faster than the real one. everyMinutes: 30 with a game clock comes round in about a real minute, and at: "20:00" lands whenever it turns evening in the world. This is the one you want for something tied to what the world looks like, such as a message at sunrise.

One thing to know about "game": it only lines up with what players actually see if vMenu is the one driving the clock, which means vMenu.Enhanced.TimeOptions.Enabled has to be on. With time sync off the game keeps its own time and your announcement lands at an hour nobody expects. The server console says so on start if you have a game entry while time sync is off.

An example

{
  "announcements": [
    {
      "name": "Rules reminder",
      "text": "Remember to read the rules. You can find them in our Discord.",
      "everyMinutes": 45
    },
    {
      "name": "Restart warning",
      "text": "~y~The server restarts in 10 minutes.~s~ Park up somewhere safe.",
      "at": "05:50",
      "clock": "real"
    },
    {
      "name": "Sunrise",
      "text": "The sun is coming up over Los Santos.",
      "at": "06:00",
      "clock": "game"
    }
  ]
}

An at announcement that the server started past waits for the next time round rather than firing the moment it loads, so restarting at 20:05 will not replay your 20:00 message.

Editing from inside the menu

Staff with the ManageAnnouncements permission can add and remove scheduled announcements from Admin, Scheduled Announcements without touching the file. Adding one asks you for three things in a row: a name, the text, and when it should go.

It asks for the timing first, on its own, and checks it before it asks for anything else. That is on purpose: the timing is the one answer that can be typed wrong, and finding that out after you had written the whole announcement would throw the writing away.

What it accepts:

You type	What you get
@45	Every 45 minutes, real time
@5 game or @5game	Every 5 minutes on the in game clock, so about ten real seconds
10:30	At half past ten in the morning, real time
10:30 game or 10:30game	At half past ten in the morning in game

The @ is what marks a repeat, so @30 repeats every half hour and 10:30 is a time of day. Adding game on the end of either switches the clock, with or without a space in front of it.

In the list, an announcement on the in game clock is marked with a green G next to its timing, and the description underneath spells it out. Anything without the G runs on real time.

Saving from the menu rewrites announcements.json, which means any comments you left in that file are lost. This is the same trade blips.json makes, and it is called out in the file’s own header.

Turning the whole thing off

Setting vMenu.Enhanced.Admin.ScheduledAnnouncements to false in your configuration.cfg stops anything sending itself, without you having to delete the file. Staff can still send announcements by hand while it is off, and the menu says plainly that the schedule is switched off so nobody thinks it is broken.

Settings

These go in your configuration.cfg. They are all listed in the configuration.cfg.example file your server writes on every start.

Setting	What it does
vMenu.Enhanced.Admin.ClearAreaRadius	How far around a player Clear Area reaches, in metres. Default 100.
vMenu.Enhanced.Admin.ClosestPlayerRange	How far away freeze and grab will still find somebody, in metres. Default 5, maximum 15.
vMenu.Enhanced.Admin.ScheduledAnnouncements	Whether the announcement schedule runs at all. Default true.
vMenu.Enhanced.Admin.AnnouncementSeconds	How long an announcement stays on screen. Default 20.

Permissions

Permission	What it allows
...Admin.Menu	Seeing the menu at all
...Admin.FreezePlayer	Freezing and unfreezing the closest player
...Admin.GrabPlayer	Picking the closest player up and putting them down
...Admin.DeleteVehicle	Deleting the vehicle in front of you, or the one you are sat in
...Admin.DeleteEmptyVehicles	Wiping every empty vehicle on the server
...Admin.DeleteAllVehicles	Wiping every vehicle on the server, occupied ones included
...Admin.ClearArea	Clearing the world around you, for everybody near you
...Admin.Announce	Sending an announcement to the whole server
...Admin.ManageAnnouncements	Adding and removing scheduled announcements, which writes the config file
...Admin.RefreshPermissions	Refreshing everybody’s permissions at once
...Admin.ResetRoutingBucket	Putting yourself back in the default world

All of them start with vMenu.Enhanced.Menus., and ...Admin.All grants the lot. They are listed in the config/permissions.cfg.example file your server writes on every start.

Two more live with the Online Players menu rather than here:

Permission	What it allows
...OnlinePlayers.RefreshPermissions	Refreshing one player’s permissions from their row in Online Players
...OnlinePlayers.NoClip	Lending a player noclip, and putting them into or out of it, from their row in Online Players

And one that used to be here now lives with Display Settings, because it only changes what you see on your own screen rather than doing anything to the server:

Permission	What it allows
...DisplaySettings.SeeNoClipPlayers	Seeing players who are hidden because they are in noclip

If you are updating from an older version

Two permissions moved, and their names moved with them:

Old name	New name
vMenu.Enhanced.Menus.MiscSettings.ClearArea	vMenu.Enhanced.Menus.Admin.ClearArea
vMenu.Enhanced.Menus.MiscSettings.SeeNoClipPlayers	vMenu.Enhanced.Menus.DisplaySettings.SeeNoClipPlayers

If your permissions.cfg still has the old lines, those two tools stop being granted until you update them. Nothing breaks, they simply stop appearing for the people who used to have them.

Seeing players in noclip has moved twice. It started in Misc Settings, spent a while in this menu, and now sits in Display Settings. So if your permissions.cfg has the middle name, vMenu.Enhanced.Menus.Admin.SeeNoClipPlayers, that one needs updating to the Display Settings name as well.

One setting moved as well:

Old name	New name
vMenu.Enhanced.MiscSettings.ClearAreaRadius	vMenu.Enhanced.Admin.ClearAreaRadius

If you had changed that from its default, set it again under the new name. Leaving the old line in does nothing, so it is safe to delete.

Both example files are rewritten every time your server starts, so the quickest way to see the new names is to start the server once and open config/permissions.cfg.example and config/configuration.cfg.example.