Don't let a stranger flatten your world - turn on the whitelist
By default your Minecraft server is open to the internet. Here's the ten-second fix that keeps griefers out - plus the Mojang trick we run behind the scenes.
Here's something most new server owners learn the hard way: by default, your Minecraft server is open to the entire internet. Anyone who finds your IP - and they do, server-list crawlers are relentless - can hop in. Most of the time it's harmless curiosity. Sometimes it's a kid with TNT and a grudge against everything you've built.
A whitelist fixes this in about ten seconds. Only the names on the list can join. Everyone else gets bounced at the door with a "You are not white-listed" message, no matter how they found the address.
You've got two ways to manage it on Netlonics. The simple one: open your server in the dashboard, scroll to the Whitelist panel, type a name, hit Add. The geeky one: open the file manager and edit whitelist.json directly - same end result, useful when you want to bulk-paste a few dozen names from your Discord.
Fun bit: when the dashboard adds a name, we actually call Mojang's API to look up the player's real account UUID and the canonical spelling of their name. So if a friend tells you their name is "Steve" but they actually go by "ste_ve", we'll catch it. If Mojang is having an outage, or you're running an offline-mode server, we fall back to a deterministic offline UUID so the entry still works. Pretty neat.
Two practical notes:
- The change applies live - no restart needed. We send
whitelist reloadfor you. - The whitelist only blocks new connections. Anyone already inside stays. If you're locking down because someone is actively griefing right now, kick them from the console first, then add the whitelist.
Want a screenshot walkthrough? We just wrote one: Edit your Minecraft server's whitelist.