Help:Toolforge/Rules

This page contains information about the rules that govern Toolforge use.

Toolforge rules

As part of Wikimedia Cloud Services, Toolforge is subject to the general Cloud Services Terms of use, and is governed by the following additional rules:

All code run in the Tools project must be of benefit to the Wikimedia movement.
Using resources for any other reason is considered abuse and may result in a loss of access. This ban does include, but is not limited to, all mining for cryptographic currencies. This class of activity also falls under the Prohibited Uses section of the TOU.
All code in the Tools project must be published under an OSI approved open source license
The absence of a license means that default copyright laws apply. Without a clear license, you are implicitly claiming copyright without providing an explanation of the rights you are willing to grant to others who wish to use or modify your software. This means that you retain all rights to your source code and that nobody else may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work until standard copyright lapses. In the United States today that means until 70 years after your death. This is counter to the general principles of the Wikimedia movement.
Do not use your personal account for noninteractive use
Any process intended to keep running while you are not actively interacting with it (e.g., through a detached screen session, as a background process, or through cron) must be run through a tool account, and not your personal account.
Do not run noninteractive processes on the bastion servers
Likewise, any process meant to execute without direct interaction should be submitted to the Kubernetes cluster and not run directly on the login hosts. It is permissible to run lightweight processes (such as submitting a job, or rotating logs), but for anything that runs for more than a few seconds or consumes large amounts of resources the job grid or Kubernetes should be used. Processes running on the bastion servers are subject to termination without notice.
Do not run wikis or user-contributed content sites with open registration
Spambots are very good at finding and flooding wikis, forums and other forms of user-contributed content sites to hammer with their crud. Tools that allow end-users to post content should limit posting to registered users who have been validated in some generally reliable manner (either by human verification, by checking against the user being a project member, or using OAuth).
Do not provide direct access to Cloud Services resources to unauthenticated users
For instance, do not allow web clients to issue shell commands or arbitrary SQL queries against the databases. Cloud Services resources are shared and limited, and it must be possible to attribute usage to specific LDAP users who are bound to the terms of use. Toolforge admin vetted Tools which include substantial anti-abuse and attribution information, such as PAWS and Superset, are allowed.

Communication and support

Support and administration of the WMCS resources is provided by the Wikimedia Foundation Cloud Services team and Wikimedia movement volunteers. Please reach out with questions and join the conversation:

Discuss and receive general support

Chat in real time in the IRC channel #wikimedia-cloud ^connect or the bridged Telegram group
Discuss via email after you have subscribed to the cloud@ mailing list

Stay aware of critical changes and plans

Subscribe to the cloud-announce@ mailing list (all messages are also mirrored to the cloud@ list)
Read the News wiki page

Track work tasks and report bugs

Use a subproject of the #Cloud-Services Phabricator project to track confirmed bug reports and feature requests about the Cloud Services infrastructure itself

Read stories and WMCS blog posts

Read the Cloud Services Blog (for the broader Wikimedia movement, see the Wikimedia Technical Blog)

Toolforge rules

Communication and support

See also