As per the documentation, PAWS is intended for a limited set of use cases. Unfortunately, due to the flexible nature of our jupyter notebooks installation, there are ways in which users can make use of Shell access to install applications and make use of our infrastructure for personal gain, without any benefit to Wiki projects.

Not only this violates the intended use cases on PAWS, but it ends up creating bloat that accumulates over time and increases disk usage, sometimes causing low disk space alerts (T429578) which would ultimately block legit use cases from

We have a script currently cleaning up some existing folders and locks users out, but we should automate it to run e.g. every 24h and make sure it covers more misuse applications (at least the ones we are able to detect at the moment).

As part of this, we also need to:

• Improve how we communicate locked out accounts (T431915)
• Document the "ban" process and in which cases it happens
• Communicate how to reach out in case of an appeal is warranted