Plugin Universe

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Contributor terms

Status: in force, and due another look before this site is promoted. These terms have had a second opinion and were judged adequate to open contributions on. That is not the same as a lawyer's sign-off, and it is recorded that way deliberately: the intention below is settled and stated plainly, the wording has been read by someone other than its author, and neither of those is a formal review. Before this site is promoted — advertised, or carrying paid placement — it should get one, because this document has legal effect and the rest of the repository does not.

The short version

  • Facts you contribute go into the public domain (CC0). Plugin names, formats, parameters, categories, links, corrections.
  • Prose you write stays yours, licensed so others can share and adapt it with credit (CC BY-SA 4.0). Wiki text, descriptions you author, reviews.
  • You can withdraw future contributions, not past ones. A public-domain dedication cannot be taken back. This matters and is explained below.
  • Only contribute what is yours to give. Do not paste in text from other catalogues or vendor sites.
  • We store your GitHub login and display name. Not your email address.

The rest is detail.

1. What these terms cover

They apply when you contribute anything to Plugin Universe: a correction, a new plugin entry, a wiki edit, a tag, or any other addition or change.

You agree to them by contributing. If you do not agree, do not contribute — everything in the catalogue remains free to read and to download regardless.

2. Two licences, and which applies

The split follows the nature of the work, not who did it.

Factual contributions are dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. This covers anything that is a statement about how the world is: a plugin's name, its vendor, its formats, its parameters and their ranges, its category, its licence, where to download it, a correction to any of these.

Individual facts are generally not copyrightable anyway. The dedication removes the doubt, and it removes the possibility of a database right accumulating over a compilation that is meant to be free.

Authored prose is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. This covers text you actually wrote: a wiki page explaining what a plugin is good for, a description in your own words, an explanation of a technique. You keep the copyright. You license it so that others may share and adapt it, with credit, under the same terms.

Which one applies is decided by where the contribution goes, and that is structural. Factual and authored contributions are written to separate named graphs with different licence flags, so the boundary is a property of the store rather than a judgement someone makes later. If you are unsure which a contribution is, contribute it and ask — it is easier to move than to unpick.

3. Withdrawal, and what it cannot do

You may stop contributing at any time, and you may ask for your account and your contributions to be removed. That request will be honoured: your contributions and the attribution to you are deleted, along with your account.

A CC0 dedication already made cannot be revoked. That is what CC0 is. Once a fact has been dedicated to the public domain it is in the public domain, and neither you nor this project can put it back. In practice:

  • Copies already downloaded, mirrored, or included in a published data dump are beyond anyone's control.
  • Anyone who took the data before your removal may continue to use it.
  • The fact may well remain in the catalogue afterwards, because someone else contributed it too, or because a harvester finds it in a public source.

Removal deletes your contribution and your name from this catalogue. It does not un-publish anything.

For prose under CC BY-SA the position is similar: the licence you granted is irrevocable for copies already made, though the text is removed here.

If that is not acceptable to you, the time to decide is before contributing.

4. What you promise

By contributing you confirm that:

  1. It is yours to contribute. You wrote it, or it is factual information you are free to state, or you have permission from whoever holds the rights.
  2. You are not copying someone else's text. Do not paste descriptions from vendor sites, other plugin catalogues, forum posts or documentation. A curated catalogue is protected in the EU and UK by database right in addition to any copyright, and this project takes that seriously enough to have excluded sources over it.
  3. It contains no personal data about anyone else. A maintainer's public name and their role on a project are catalogue data. Email addresses, home addresses, and anything else about a private individual are not.
  4. It is offered in good faith. Not spam, not promotional copy dressed as a fact, not a deliberate misrepresentation of a competitor.

If you contribute on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to do so.

5. What is stored about you

Signing in is through GitHub. The application asks for no scopes, which means it can read only what GitHub already makes public.

Stored:

  • your GitHub login and numeric id
  • your display name, if you have set one publicly
  • a link to your avatar image
  • your contributions, and when you made them
  • your trust level and whether you are suspended

Not stored:

  • your email address — the sign-in deliberately cannot read it
  • a password, because there is never one to store
  • your GitHub access token, which is used once to confirm who you are and then discarded

Account data lives in its own graph, flagged as personal data and marked not-redistributable, so it is excluded from every public data dump by the same mechanism that excludes any other non-redistributable source.

6. Attribution

Contributions are attributed to your GitHub login, visibly, and recorded in the data with provenance. Anyone can see who contributed what and when.

Attribution for the factual catalogue is requested of downstream users rather than required — CC0 imposes no conditions. Attribution for prose is required by CC BY-SA, and that requirement runs to you as its author.

7. Review, moderation and removal

New contributors' first contributions are reviewed before they go live. After a number of accepted contributions, later ones appear immediately. This exists to keep moderation sustainable for a small project, not to gatekeep.

Contributions may be edited, reverted or removed — by moderators, or by other contributors in the case of wiki text. Every change is recorded with its author and time, so history and rollback are always available.

Accounts may be suspended for spam, for repeated bad-faith contributions, or for contributing material the contributor did not have the right to contribute.

There is no obligation to accept any contribution, and no appeal process beyond asking.

8. No warranty

The catalogue is provided as it is. The data is harvested from third parties and measured automatically; it will contain errors. Nothing here is a recommendation or a fitness-for-purpose claim about any plugin, and measurements describe one plugin version on one machine at one time.

Downloads link to third-party sites. This project does not host binaries, does not control what is at the other end of a link, and cannot vouch for it. Where a source publishes a checksum, it is recorded — check it.

9. Changes to these terms

These terms may change. Changes apply to contributions made after the change, not retroactively to contributions already made under earlier terms. Material changes will be announced, and the history of this document is public in the repository.

10. Contact

Danny Ayers — danny.ayers@gmail.com, or an issue on the repository. Other routes are on the contact page; the address is repeated here because a document setting out terms should not send you elsewhere to find out how to invoke them.

Email is the right route for anything about your account or your data: withdrawal, removal, or a correction to what is recorded about you. It is also the route if something in the catalogue is yours and should not be there, whether or not you contributed it — say so and it will be dealt with rather than argued about.

See also: about.md for what the project is, sources.md §4 for the review of every source's terms.