Terms, content and takedowns

Only-LANs is a community for showing the networks people build — racks, closets, cable runs, wall boards, diagrams. It is operated by Aleph Consulting. These terms are written to be read rather than to be impressive; if something here is unclear, ask and we will fix the wording.

Your account

Accounts are created through IDConnect and approved by a person, not a script. We ask a short question at sign-up because a small community with a door is easier to keep pleasant than a large one without. We may decline or close an account, and if we close yours we will tell you why.

What you post stays yours

You keep ownership of everything you post. By posting, you give us permission to store it and display it on Only-LANs, and you allow other people to view it here. That permission ends for future display if you delete your content or your account, though copies may persist in backups for a time and anything already seen or saved by others is out of everyone’s hands.

Don’t post material you don’t have the right to post.

Photographs of networks you do not own

This is the rule that matters most here, and the one most likely to catch a well-meaning person out.

A great deal of the best work on a site like this is done for someone else — an employer, a client, a customer’s building. If the network in your photograph is not yours, get permission before you post it, and post it as your work rather than as their identity. In practice that means:

• no company names, logos, addresses, or anything that identifies whose building it is;
• nothing that shows how to get into a place — door hardware in context, lock types, alarm panels, keypads, badge readers tied to a recognisable location;
• no visible credentials, serial numbers, licence keys, WAN addresses, SSIDs or device names that identify an organisation;
• no exterior shots, street views or anything with a visible address.

A photograph of a well-dressed rack is a photograph of your craft. It does not need to say whose rack it is, and the moment it does, you have published somebody else’s security posture without asking them.

If you are posting your own home lab, none of this applies — post away.

Metadata

We strip EXIF metadata, including GPS coordinates, from images uploaded here, and we have verified that it works. Do not rely on it as your only protection: strip metadata before you upload, especially from phone photographs, which record where they were taken by default. Anything you post is public and can be downloaded by anyone.

Uploaded images are resized when they are stored.

Conduct

Be decent. Specifically: no harassment, no hate, no doxxing, no posting anyone’s personal information, no sexual content, no advertising or link-dropping, no malware or exploit-sharing, and no using this place to sell things. Criticism of work is welcome and normal — criticism of a person is not.

Moderators may remove content and restrict accounts. If something of yours is removed and you think that was wrong, reply to the notice and say so.

Removals and complaints

If something here shouldn’t be here — your work posted without permission, your building identifiable in someone’s photograph, your copyright, your face — write to [email protected] with a link to the post and a sentence on what the problem is. You do not need to be a lawyer, and you do not need to explain yourself at length.

We act on plausible requests quickly and ask questions afterwards. Where a photograph identifies premises, we take it down first and discuss it second.

Copyright complaints should identify the work, the post, and your relationship to the work, and include a way to reach you.

What we don’t promise

This is a community run by a small number of people. We do not guarantee that it will be available, that content will be preserved, or that it will exist forever. Take your own copies of anything you would miss. We are not responsible for what other members post, and following the advice here does not make us responsible for what you post either.

Privacy, briefly

We store your account details, what you post, and ordinary server logs. We do not sell any of it. Notification email is sent from only-lans.com. If you want your account and content removed, write to the address above.

Changes

If these terms change materially, we will say so on the site rather than quietly editing this page.

Contact: [email protected]