puzzling.org users

Please note that I want people to self police on this: I won’t be seeking evidence that you’re not following the below, I want to trust people. If any part of the below is not acceptable to you, please talk to me first (perhaps it was misworded or there’s an implication I didn’t consider) and if you really want to host things I won’t allow, I’m happy to forward your email and delegate your domain.

Hosting puzzling.org at Linode requires that I abide by their terms of service and acceptable use policy. Therefore, I require that my users also follow them, and that any violations may result in a temporary suspension of your account and a warning or a permanent suspension if Linode seems to require it of me; and a second violation will result in a permanent suspension. I am willing to consider redirecting your email and delegate your domain name in the event of such a suspension.

In particular:

• do not use puzzling.org servers to send or relay spam (if you’ve done this, I will do everything in my power to pass on the $500 fine that Linode will apply to me);
• do not use puzzling.org to host insecure web programs (if you don’t have a clue what to think about this one, please ask me to audit the software); and
• do not host or transmit any material that is or you suspect might be illegal under either Australian or US law, including but not limited to child pornography and copyright infringing material.

Note that under Australian law, even textual descriptions of minors engaging in sexual acts may be considered child pornography. If you intend to host or transmit anything that even touches on minors and sex, you may be best off seeking legal advice, and I’d appreciate the warning so that I can do likewise. Also recall that since the beginning of January 2006 you should be equally careful publishing material that has anything to do with suicide.

Please respect the privacy of other users on the system and do not attempt to exploit security holes or other lapses to access or change data that your user account shouldn’t be able to access or change. If you discover that something about the system is insecure, you should let me know about it and I’ll be very grateful.

In addition, since I provide hosting to most people and sysadmin services to everyone for free:

• do not host sites from which you intend to make money (this includes things like hosting Google ads); and
• do not host pornography of any kind, because it tends to be incredibly popular, and I don’t want to have to pay the associated bandwidth fees.

Be sensible about the porn thing: the odd naked shot is OK, a bunch of naked shots probably should be password protected so that the masses can’t eat all my bandwidth, shots of sexual acts I’ll consider porn for the purposes of the above.

If you want to host very popular material or make money from your site, you should move to your own paid hosting, not least because they may be able to guarentee a minimum level of service, whereas I can’t and won’t.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 5th, 2006 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Policy. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.