Illegal and harmful content
You may not use the service to store, transmit or process anything unlawful. This includes, without limitation:
- Child sexual abuse material. This is reported to the relevant authorities and results in an immediate permanent ban.
- Content that harasses, threatens, defames, or incites violence or hatred against any person or group.
- Material that infringes someone else's copyright, trade mark or other rights, including pirated software and media.
- Malware, ransomware, keyloggers, and tools for distributing them.
- Phishing pages, credential harvesters, and anything designed to defraud.
- Sites, bots or accounts that pass themselves off as a company, service or person, such as fake giveaway, gift or login pages, whether or not they collect anything. Clearly labelled parody and fan projects are fine.
Sexual content
Nothing hosted here may exist to show, share or sell sexually explicit material. This is about what a project is for, not about policing language: jokes, innuendo, swearing, crude humour and discussion of adult topics are fine, and so is a moderation tool that detects explicit content in order to remove it.
What is not allowed:
- Pornography and sexually explicit images, video, audio or text, whether stored here or fetched from elsewhere and passed on.
- Bots, sites and APIs whose purpose is to post, search for or serve that material, including bots that pull it from other sites into a chat.
- Advertising or arranging sexual services, and adult content sold or offered behind a paywall.
- Sexual content that has been shared or generated without the consent of the person shown, including deepfakes.
- Any sexual content involving minors, including drawn, animated and AI-generated depictions. This is treated exactly as child sexual abuse material is above.
Hosting what other people upload
Your server is for your project, not for storing content on behalf of strangers. Anything your project lets other people upload that is then kept on our servers is content we can end up answerable for, and open upload services attract exactly the material this policy prohibits.
Storing what your users need your app to keep is fine: accounts, settings, chat messages, scores, and the small records an app runs on. So is receiving a file, processing or forwarding it, and deleting it straight afterwards. What is not allowed:
- Public file, image or video hosts, where people other than you upload files that are kept and served back to others.
- Paste sites, anonymous boards, and any other service where the public can publish content that is stored here.
- Letting other people use your server as storage for their own files, backups or media.
Personal data about other people
Plenty of projects handle personal data and that is fine: a bot that stores user IDs for levels or warnings, a moderation log for a server you run, a web app with user accounts. What matters is that the data is used for what people would reasonably expect, in the place it was collected. What is not allowed:
- Tracking people across servers, groups or communities, such as message loggers or lookup services that build up a history of what someone has said or where they have been.
- Doxxing: collecting or publishing anyone's real name, address, contact details, workplace or similar to expose, target or intimidate them.
- Selling, publishing, or offering searches over personal data that was scraped, leaked or taken from a breach.
- Covert surveillance, including tools that record, track or report on someone's activity or location without their knowledge.
Gambling
Games played with points or currency that has no real value, such as Discord economy bots or casino games played for fun, are fine. What is not allowed:
- Gambling for stakes or prizes with real-world value: money, cryptocurrency, gift cards, or items and skins that can be sold or traded.
- Promoting gambling sites, or referring people to them.
Political content
We do not host projects that exist to promote a political position, whichever position it is. This applies the same way to every country, conflict, party and cause, and we do not judge whether the message is right. It is about what a project is for: a community bot whose members happen to talk about politics is fine, as is a moderation tool that deals with political arguments, a general news feed that covers politics among everything else, or a tool that helps people register to vote or find a polling station without telling them who to vote for. What is not allowed:
- Bots, sites and channels that exist to spread political messaging, campaigning or propaganda for or against any government, party, politician, movement or cause.
- Feeds that relay news, commentary or updates focused on a particular political conflict, government, party or cause, whatever their source or slant.
- Coordinated posting to push a political narrative, including sockpuppet accounts, astroturfing, and mass reposting or cross-posting of political content.
- Fundraising, recruitment or petitions for a political party, campaign or cause.
Sending email
Your project may send email that its users have asked for, such as sign-up confirmations, password resets and notifications, through an email provider's API or SMTP relay. What is not allowed:
- Running your own mail server, or sending email directly from your server rather than through a provider.
- Bulk or marketing email to people who have not asked to receive it.
The rules of the platform you connect to
Whatever your code talks to, that platform's own rules effectively apply here too. A project that gets you banned there will get you banned from us, and we do not need the platform to tell us first. Across every platform, this means no:
- Automating a personal or user account where the platform provides a proper bot interface instead.
- Mass unsolicited messaging, advertising spam, scraping contacts, adding people to groups uninvited, or follower and member farming.
- Raid, nuke, crash and mass-ban tools, or anything built to disrupt a server, group or channel.
- Token grabbers, token checkers, credential farming, and account generators.
- Circumventing a platform's rate limits, anti-abuse measures or API restrictions.
- Joining, automating against, or attacking any server or group you do not have permission to be on. On Minecraft in particular, that includes griefing and crashing servers.
Automation a platform does not support
Some platforms have no official way to run a bot on a personal account, and the tools people use to do it anyway work by imitating the real client. WhatsApp is the clearest example, and the page about it says plainly that we do not recommend it.
You may run that kind of bot here, within every other rule in this policy. What you may not do is use it for the unsolicited messaging above, which is both the fastest way to lose the account and the most common reason we suspend one of these. The risk to your own account, number or contacts is yours alone — the Terms of Service set that out under "The platforms your project connects to".
Resource abuse
Your allocation is 25% of a CPU core, 256 MB of memory and 512 MB of disk. Network traffic and disk activity also have fair-use limits. They are set well above what a bot, a small site or an API normally uses, and exist to catch things like floods and heavy file serving; a server that goes far past them may be suspended while we look at it. Within all that, run what you like. What you may not do is work around the limits or use the service for something other than running a small project of your own:
- Cryptocurrency mining, and any other proof-of-work or distributed compute workload.
- Using your allocation as file storage, a media server or a CDN, or to serve large downloads, video or other bandwidth-heavy content. A small web app or API is fine; a file host is not.
- Registering multiple accounts to stack allocations, or sharing one account between people to do the same.
- Deliberately sustained resource exhaustion, including fork bombs and disk-filling loops.
- BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file sharing: clients, seedboxes and trackers, whatever is being shared.
- Web scraping at scale: crawling sites, harvesting pages in bulk, or requesting a site far more often than a person would. It gets our addresses blocked for everyone who shares them. Fetching a page now and then, such as checking a price, a score or a status every so often, is fine.
- Reselling, sublicensing, or otherwise providing your allocation to third parties.
Reporting abuse
If you believe something hosted here breaches this policy, email [email protected]. Tell us what you saw and where, and include anything that would help us identify it. We investigate every report we receive.
How we enforce this
Depending on what has happened and whether it looks deliberate, we may warn you, suspend your server, suspend your account, or terminate it permanently.
Some of this is automated. Code that is heavily obfuscated, packed or encrypted to hide what it does may be treated as suspicious for that reason alone, so if you have a legitimate reason for it, expect to be asked about it.
A termination applies to you, not only to the account. Creating another account to carry on after one has been terminated, or to get around a suspension, is a breach in itself, and that account will be terminated too.
We will normally warn you first and give you an opportunity to fix the problem. We will not do so where the activity is illegal, actively harming others, or destabilising our infrastructure — those are actioned immediately.
If you believe we have got it wrong, reply to the notice we send you and we will look at it again. For a free server we cannot guarantee an appeals process or any particular outcome. Where you are paying for the server, we will review the decision and reply to you, and if we uphold a suspension we will refund the unused part of that month.