| What you see | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
Codes like &6 shown as text | Vanilla servers don’t understand & codes | Use § codes, written as § |
| Strange characters around the colour codes | The file was saved in an encoding that mangled the § sign | Write every § as § so the line is plain ASCII |
| Everything on one line | No line break escape | Put \n between the two lines |
| The second line is missing or ends early | A real line break in the file ended the setting | Keep the whole MOTD on one line of the file, using \n |
| Bold or italic disappears | A colour code came after the formatting code | Colour first, then formatting: §6§l |
| Formatting runs into the second line | Nothing resets it at the line break | Add §r before \n |
| Hex colours look like the wrong colour | Vanilla only has the 16 standard colours | Use standard colours, or a MOTD plugin |
| A backslash vanished | A single \ starts an escape | Write \\ |
| Text is cut off | The line is wider than the server list | Shorten it and check the preview |
| The old MOTD still shows | The server wasn’t restarted, a proxy sets its own MOTD, or the server list hasn’t refreshed | Restart, check the proxy config, press Refresh in the server list |
A line that works
motd=§6§lMy Survival Server§r\n§7Whitelisted, apply on DiscordBuild yours in the MOTD Generator to get the escapes right, then paste the whole line over the old one.
See what the server actually sends
After restarting, check the server in Server Status. It shows the MOTD as the server sends it, without your game’s server list cache in the way. If it looks right there but not in game, the problem is the cache or a proxy, not the file.