Discord Bot Permissions and Dashboard Access Control

Discord permissions Volvox.Bot requests for moderation and logging, plus dashboard access roles and per-feature role restrictions you can configure.

Permissions

Discord permissions

When you add Volvox.Bot to your server, it requests the permissions it needs to function. These include:

Permission	Why it’s needed
Kick Members	Moderation actions
Ban Members	Moderation actions
View Channels	Access channels for logging and AI conversations
Send Messages	Bot responses, notifications
Manage Messages	Auto-mod message deletion
Read Message History	Access prior messages for AI context and search
Moderate Members	Moderation timeouts

Volvox.Bot only uses permissions when performing an action. It doesn’t read or store messages unless a feature requires it.

Dashboard access

Discord roles control dashboard access. By default, anyone with the Manage Server permission can access the dashboard for their server.

Configure who has access in Settings → Dashboard Access:

• Admin — Full access to all dashboard features
• Moderator — Access to moderation, tickets, and audit log
• Viewer — Read-only access to analytics and settings

Per-feature permissions

Each feature can be restricted to specific roles. For example, you can allow all moderators to view the audit log but restrict config changes to admins only.

Global admin access

Some dashboard pages expose infrastructure-level data that isn’t tied to a single server. These pages are reserved for global admins — operators of the Volvox.Bot deployment itself, not server admins.

What requires global admin

The following dashboard pages and APIs are restricted to global admins:

• Performance (/dashboard/performance) — Bot uptime, latency, and resource trends across all guilds.
• Logs (/dashboard/logs) — Live log stream and the underlying log-stream WebSocket ticket endpoint.

If you aren’t a global admin, these entries are hidden from the sidebar and visiting their URLs redirects you back to the dashboard. All other dashboard features (moderation, tickets, AI, analytics, configuration) continue to follow your per-server role.

Configuring global admins

Global admins are set via the BOT_OWNER_IDS environment variable on the server running the bot and dashboard. Provide a comma-separated list of Discord user IDs:

BOT_OWNER_IDS=123456789012345678,987654321098765432

Each ID must be a Discord user ID (snowflake) for an account that signs in to the dashboard with Discord OAuth. Changes take effect after the dashboard process is restarted.

Global admin status is independent of any server’s roles. A user listed in BOT_OWNER_IDS only gains access to the operator-only pages above — they are still bound by normal Discord permissions for the servers they belong to.