Hi Marc thanks for your reply

I had been looking over those links yesterday and think I had just got to close to it all and could not work out what's what.

I had tried the package manifest but there was nothing in there, I did try adding it and I ended up with two of the same dashboard though so that did not work.

I gave the the override dashboard a go again and this time started to get it working, but alas it was also adding a second panel and the 2nd one was conforming to the permissions I had set but the other was still showing for everyone. In the end what I did get to work, was setting the permissions, but where you remove then re-add the dashboard I just set it to remove only. This stopped the 2nd dashboard showing and the one that did show conforms to the permissions I had set :D

it ended up looking like this:

public class MyComposer2 : IComposer
{
    public void Compose(Composition composition)
    {
        composition.Dashboards()
            // Remove the default
            .Remove<SimpleRedirects.Core.RedirectDashboard>();
    }
}

// overridden redirect dashboard with custom rules
public class MyRedirectDashboard : SimpleRedirects.Core.RedirectDashboard, IDashboard
{
    // override explicit implementation
    IAccessRule[] IDashboard.AccessRules { get; } = new IAccessRule[]
    {
        new AccessRule {Type = AccessRuleType.Deny, Value = Umbraco.Core.Constants.Security.WriterGroupAlias},
        new AccessRule {Type = AccessRuleType.Deny, Value = Umbraco.Core.Constants.Security.EditorGroupAlias},
        new AccessRule {Type = AccessRuleType.Deny, Value = Umbraco.Core.Constants.Security.TranslatorGroupAlias},
        new AccessRule {Type = AccessRuleType.Deny, Value = Umbraco.Core.Constants.Security.SensitiveDataGroupAlias},
        new AccessRule {Type = AccessRuleType.Grant, Value = Umbraco.Core.Constants.Security.AdminGroupAlias}
    };
}