Fair use rules

The short version

CitexNode is free because a lot of people share the same machines. That works for as long as nobody tries to take more than their share. Everything below is just the long form of that one sentence.

What gets you suspended immediately

• Crypto mining, any coin, any scale. It is the most expensive way to make a node useless for everyone else, and we see it in the load curve within minutes.
• Public proxies, VPN endpoints, Tor exit nodes or anything else that pushes other people's traffic through our IP addresses. It gets our addresses blocklisted, which then hits every other server on the node.
• Illegal content: copyright infringement, warez, streaming piracy, depictions of child abuse, scam sites, phishing.
• Attack tooling: DDoS scripts, booters, stressers, port scanners aimed at other people's systems, botnet control, brute force against third-party services.
• Using a bot slot as a general purpose server: web hosting, a second game server, file storage, permanent downloads. A bot slot is for a bot.
• Multiple accounts to get around the limit on concurrent instances. A separate account for a friend who actually plays is fine. Five accounts on variations of your own email address is not.
• Spam through our systems, whether by bot, by mail or in Discord.
• Automated circumvention of limits: scripts that farm credits, work around rate limits or recreate instances every few seconds.

What is explicitly fine

So the list above does not read as more forbidding than it is meant to:

• A server that sits empty most of the week and is full on Saturday.
• Experimenting, breaking things, starting over. That is what the platform is for.
• Modpacks, plugins, your own jars, your own code. As long as it is your game or your bot, it is your business.
• A bot running on many Discord servers at once.
• A project that is never finished and gets renewed every month anyway.

The grey area

Some things depend on the load, not on the name. Ask about these first: a question beforehand costs you five minutes, a suspension afterwards costs you your server.

• A bot that does heavy compute, such as image processing or a language model: it depends on how sustained the load is.
• A Discord bot with a small web server for its dashboard: fine, as long as the bot stays the main thing.
• A bot that permanently downloads large files or builds an archive: probably not, the disk is not there for that.
• Load testing against your own services: tell us first, otherwise it looks like an attack from the outside.

What happens if we find something

• For small things you get a message first and time to fix it.
• For anything on the list above we suspend immediately. The instance is kept at first so you can fetch your data, unless the content itself is the problem.
• For illegal content we delete immediately and reserve the right to report it.
• You can always appeal through a ticket. We look at it, and if we got it wrong we reverse it.

Reporting abuse

If something is running on CitexNode that should not be, tell us: info@citexnode.de

The address or port, a timestamp and a short description of what you saw are enough. We look at every report.

Why this sounds strict

Because a single miner slows the nodes down for hundreds of other people, and a single open proxy gets our IP addresses blocklisted. The rules are here so the service can stay free, not to make it complicated.