There needs to be an option to disable smoke, explosion, and lightning in a config instead of not giving a person the effect permissions because if you are an admin or owner you don't add every permission node, you just add '*' so you can't really pick out the little things you don't want like effects. Please add a disable option for all effects in config soon, very needed for server.

The option is not giving yourself the permission node. Any permissions plugin that provides the fake * node also provides a way to negate nodes. I advise reading this post I made on the subject:

http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/vanish/forum/37410-explode-lightning-read-me-first/#p1