THIS ISSUE IS OXIDE-BASED AND NOT FOR A SINGLE SPECIFIC PLUGIN, all I ask is if a moderator could read the post before plopping me into another section, it's a general issue, not a specific plugin issue.

So, it started with just me, and my two admins, I set them up under moderatorid as it still gives them basically all admin permissions, and I used oxides grouping system to sort them into the group labeled "admin", and for that group, the two main permissions for that group were the ability to use /vanish, and /radar, but the next morning after setting that up, they both said they no longer had their admin powers. I opened rcon on my phone, ran "oxide.show group admin" and as predicted both of them appear there, and the group-specific permissions still were listed there, but neither were able to actually use them.

When I emptied the group and assigned permissions specific to SteamID's for them, things started working again, but after revoking those, and tossing them back in the group, which does have those permissions assigned to it, they lost the ability to use those again.

My main concern is if I do what I plan to do which is a moderate 5 server rollout to start with, and give modest vip options, nothing too crazy or game breaking, but it will have extra things like furnace sort for quality of life, and sign artist for fun, things like that, I don't want people who go for it, to log in, and not be able to use the permissions it advertised.

Oxide says one thing, but in-game says another, and I can't figure it out, any assistance or advice would be greatly appreciated :)

Consider using ownerid, not moderatorid - it is the same, but oxide automatically gives admin group to ownerid, not moderatorid. I've never seen Oxide revoke any groups on its own, it is either a corrupted datafile either you doing something wrong (or plugins you've installed).

Are you using convert status? If so make sure to give them the permission to "convert" when they are not an admin... Also make sure to run server.writecfg after setting them as moderators. Also are they using family shared accounts? That could possibly cause an issue

From what you've mentioned, it sounds like the players are referring to their Rust moderator functionality, not Oxide commands. The Oxide permission/group system hasn't changed in probably... 6 years, and we've not had any reports from the many thousands using on a daily basis.

As mentioned above though, if "writecfg" isn't used (or users.cfg manually edited while server is offline), then those players would not retain their Rust native moderator functionality between server restarts.