Bukkit

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. Giving a player a rank/permission
2. Restarting server
3.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
What we expected is that they would still have what was given before the reset, what happened was that they got reset to before we added the perms/rank

What version of the product are you using?
1.3 Snapshot

Do you have an error log of what happened?

Please provide any additional information below.

Going back through the zpermissions file, it seems to generate a "data.yml" file upon restart or reload of the plugin.

I tested adding a node to a player, and reloading the plugin with that data.yml~ file in there, and upon reload the node that was added diapered. I then deleted the data.yml~ file and ran the same test, and upon reload the node was still added to the player. I then removed the node from the player, reloaded the plugin again, and the node was added back to the player after reload.

We have removed the file many times, but it seems whenever the server restarts, or the plugin is reloaded, it generates that file again.

Well, as zPermissions is probably saving the current configuration on Plugin unload, this is probably what overwrites your file on server reload. (This would also happen to other plugins that do it like this.)

The most obvious quick fix would be to edit the file while the server is not running.

If you don't want to do that, you can also try the command

/permissions refresh

after changing your file.

But actually the Right Thing™ to do is instead of editing the file manually you should use the in-game zPermissions commands like:

/permissions player <player_name_or_uuid> <action> [arguments...]
/permissions group <group_name> <action> [arguments...]

etc.