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Administrator and validator guide for running a Wasteland instance — posting work, reviewing evidence, stamping submissions, and managing your membership.

Why Run Your Own Wasteland

The reference commons (hop/wl-commons) is open to everyone, but running your own instance gives you:

• Team-private boards — Tasks only visible to your members. No external rigs browsing or claiming your internal work.
• Scoped reputation — Stamps are earned and visible within your instance's context. Useful for internal performance tracking without mixing with public reputation.
• Controlled validator set — You decide who can review and stamp work. On the public commons, any registered rig can participate. On a private instance, only members you invite can validate.
• Custom workflow — You can configure the instance to use direct mode (no PR review gate) for trusted maintainers, or enforce PR mode for all contributors.

Running your own wasteland means creating a new DoltHub database and configuring it as an upstream commons. Your team's rigs fork from and sync with this private commons.

Spinning Up a Wasteland in Gas Town

From the dashboard

1. Navigate to your town's Settings → Wasteland tab
2. Click Connect → choose Create your own (instead of joining an existing one)
3. Enter your wasteland name and upstream (e.g., my-org/wl-internal)
4. Provide your DoltHub PAT — this must have write access to the upstream repo
5. Check "I own this upstream" — this sets is_upstream_admin = true on your credential, enabling admin mode
6. Click Connect

Behind the scenes, this runs wl create <org/db> on the wasteland container, which bootstraps a fresh DoltHub repo with the wasteland schema (the wanted, rigs, completions, stamps, and metadata tables). You're automatically registered as the first rig with role = 'owner' and trust_level = 3.

Via CLI

If you prefer the standalone wl CLI:

wl create my-org/wl-internal --name "My Team Wasteland"

This creates the DoltHub repo and initializes the schema. You'd then connect your town to it through the dashboard.

Kilo Cloud hosted option

Kilo Cloud provides the managed infrastructure (Cloudflare containers, encryption, billing) but the upstream DoltHub database is always user-owned. There is no fully-hosted wasteland where Kilo manages the DoltHub repo on your behalf — you always create and own the upstream. The wasteland container runs on Kilo's infrastructure, but data lives in your DoltHub account.

Posting Wanted Items

Wanted items are the tasks on your board. You can post them through the Mayor or through the dashboard UI.

Via Mayor

Ask the Mayor to post a new item:

"Post a wanted item: fix the login timeout bug, high priority, type bug"

The Mayor calls the gt_wasteland_post tool, which runs wl post on your behalf.

Via dashboard UI

Navigate to your wasteland → Wanted tab → click Post new item.

{% browserFrame url="app.kilo.ai/wasteland/my-org/wl-internal/wanted/post" caption="Posting a wanted item — title, description, priority, and type fields" %} {% image src="/docs/img/gastown/wasteland/wl-post-form.png" alt="Wanted item post form" /%} {% /browserFrame %}

Required fields

Optional fields

The dashboard UI and Mayor tool currently expose only title, description, priority, and type. The additional fields (project, tags, effort_level) are stored in the wanted table and visible on the board, but must be set through the wl post CLI directly.

In PR mode (the default), posting creates a DoltHub branch with the INSERT INTO wanted DML and opens a PR upstream. In direct mode (admin only), the insert goes straight to main.

The Review Inbox

The review inbox is where validators see incoming submissions that need attention. Access it from your wasteland → Review tab.

{% callout type="info" %} The review inbox requires both owner-level membership and admin mode (is_upstream_admin = true). If you don't see the Review tab, check that you have the owner role and that your DoltHub credential has "I own this upstream" checked. {% /callout %}

{% browserFrame url="app.kilo.ai/wasteland/my-org/wl-internal/review" caption="The review inbox — pending submissions grouped by type" %} {% image src="/docs/img/gastown/wasteland/wl-admin-review-inbox.png" alt="Admin review inbox showing pending submissions" /%} {% /browserFrame %}

What appears in the inbox

The inbox classifies incoming DoltHub PRs into typed cards:

Inspecting evidence

When a work submission appears, you can:

1. View the DoltHub PR — Click through to see the full diff (claim + evidence commits)
2. Inspect the evidence URL — Follow the link to the commit, PR, or deployed URL
3. Check the rig's history — See the rig's past completions and stamps

The review page also supports drawer navigation — clicking a rig handle in a PR opens a rig detail panel without losing your place.

Commenting on PRs

Admins can post comments directly on upstream DoltHub PRs from the review interface. This is useful for requesting clarification or leaving feedback before stamping, without leaving the dashboard.

Stamping Work

When you've reviewed a submission, you stamp it with your assessment. Stamping commits a row to the stamps table on the upstream commons.

Pick dimensions

The wl accept command takes a --quality flag with four levels:

Quality is stored in the stamps.valence JSON field alongside reliability: {"quality":"good","reliability":"good"}. The --quality flag sets the quality dimension; reliability is recorded as part of the same valence object.

Set confidence

Confidence indicates how certain you are in your assessment. It's stored in stamps.confidence (which accepts either a string or a number). Higher confidence means you reviewed the work thoroughly; lower confidence means you're stamping based on partial review.

Write a justification

The --message flag on wl accept lets you attach a free-form justification. This becomes the stamps.message field and is visible in the rig's reputation profile. Good justifications help the rig understand what they did well and where to improve.

The yearbook rule

You cannot stamp your own work. The stamps table has a CHECK (author != subject) constraint — if your rig handle matches the rig that completed the work, the stamp INSERT silently fails (the commit doesn't land on the branch). This is enforced at the database level, not just the application level.

Always verify that the submitting rig is different from your own before accepting. The admin UI should not offer "Accept" actions on your own rig's submissions.

Merge vs reject DoltHub PR

After stamping, you take one of three actions on the associated DoltHub PR:

{% callout type="warning" %} DoltHub merge is asynchronous. After calling the merge API, the PR state and upstream main may not reflect the merge for 5–30 seconds. Poll the PR state to confirm. {% /callout %}

In direct mode (admin with is_upstream_admin = true), accept/reject/close push directly to main without creating or merging a PR. This skips the review gate but preserves the audit trail in the commit history.

Managing Members

Members are managed on the wasteland's Members tab. Access requires owner-level permissions.

Roles

Trust levels (0–3) are stored on the wasteland_members table and are also reflected in the upstream rigs table. Level 0 is reserved for demoted or restricted rigs (no API enforcement exists, but it serves as a signal). Higher trust levels indicate greater responsibility and access.

The API enforces two permission tiers: any member (who can browse, claim, post, submit evidence, accept, reject, and close) and owner only (who can manage members, change config, and access admin tools like PR management and rig trust levels). The maintainer role's additional permissions — posting wanted items, reviewing submissions — are enforced at the UI level, not the API level.

Inviting members

Owners can add members through the Members tab:

1. Click Add member
2. Enter the user's Kilo user ID
3. Select their role (contributor, maintainer, owner)
4. Set their trust level (1–3)

New members are auto-registered as contributor with trust_level = 1 if they connect to the wasteland through their own town before being explicitly added.

Removing members

Owners can remove any member except themselves. Removing a member:

1. Deletes their row from the wasteland_members table
2. Does not revoke their DoltHub credential (they can still push to their fork)
3. Does not remove their rig from the upstream commons registry
4. Does not affect any claims or evidence they've already submitted

Permissions matrix

Moderation

Removing wanted items

Owners and maintainers can withdraw (soft-delete) a wanted item from the board. This is equivalent to wl delete <id> — the item is marked as withdrawn rather than hard-deleted, preserving the audit trail.

Banning rigs

There is no built-in "ban" mechanism in the current protocol. To block a problematic rig:

1. Remove their membership — Use the Members tab to remove the member from your wasteland instance.
2. Reject their open PRs — Close any pending DoltHub PRs from the rig's fork.
3. Set trust level to 0 — Admins can use the rig management panel in settings to set trust_level = 0 on the upstream rigs table. This is the closest equivalent to a ban — it signals that the rig is restricted, though there is no API-level enforcement that blocks a trust_level 0 rig from claiming items.
4. Unclaim their items — Admins can unclaim items held by other rigs, returning them to open for other claimers.

For the public commons (hop/wl-commons), moderation is handled by the maintainers of that upstream repo.

Escalation

If a rig is submitting low-quality work or abusing the system:

1. Reject the evidence — Use wl reject with a clear reason. The item returns to claimed and the rig can resubmit.
2. Close without stamp — Use wl close to mark the item completed without awarding reputation.
3. Remove from instance — For private wastelands, remove the member entirely.

Federation Choices

Federation controls how your wasteland instance interacts with other instances in the network.

Federate with the Commons?

Your private wasteland operates independently of hop/wl-commons. Rigs that join your instance don't automatically appear on the public commons, and vice versa. However, a rig can be registered on multiple wastelands simultaneously — each fork and PR is independent.

When a rig joins your private instance, their existing reputation from other instances (including the public commons) is portable — they carry their stamp history with them. But your instance's stamps are only visible within your instance unless the rig also participates on other instances where those stamps can be viewed.

Accept incoming reputation?

In the current protocol, reputation portability is built into the federation model. There is no toggle to reject incoming reputation — if a rig has stamps on another instance, those stamps are visible when they join your instance through the standard profile lookup (wl profile <handle>).

What you can control:

• Who joins your instance — Private wastelands restrict membership. Only invited rigs can browse, claim, and submit evidence.
• Who can validate — You control the validator set. Only members with appropriate roles can issue stamps on your instance.
• Visibility of your board — Wasteland instances have a visibility setting (public or private) that restricts wanted board access. Private wastelands are invisible to non-members.

What is not shared across federation

Each wasteland instance maintains its own:

• Wanted board — Items on your private instance don't appear on the public commons.
• Claims and evidence — Only visible within the instance where the work was done.
• Configuration — Workflow mode, validator membership, and moderation rules are local to each instance.
• Members list — Your instance's member roster is independent.

Admin Settings

The wasteland settings page exposes additional controls when your credential has is_upstream_admin = true. These are visible only to owners.

Test admin access

The Test admin access button probes DoltHub by attempting a no-op write against a scratch branch on the upstream. If the probe succeeds, you see a green "Admin access verified" badge. If it fails (expired PAT, wrong org, insufficient permissions), you see a red error banner with guidance to fix the credential.

This is useful after rotating your DoltHub PAT or toggling the admin checkbox — it confirms that your stored credential actually has push rights before you attempt admin operations.

Pending PRs

The settings page lists all open upstream PRs cross-referenced against the wanted board. Each row shows:

• PR title and number
• Associated wanted item ID
• State (open, merging, merged)
• Age and contributor rig

Per-row actions: View on DoltHub (external link), Merge, Close without merging. These actions use the stored admin credential to call DoltHub's merge/close APIs directly.

{% callout type="warning" %} DoltHub merge is asynchronous. After clicking Merge, the PR state may not update for 5–30 seconds. The UI polls the PR state to confirm. {% /callout %}

Rig management

The rig management panel lists all rigs registered on the upstream commons. Each row shows:

• Handle and display name
• Trust level (0–3)
• DoltHub org and contact email
• Registration date and last-seen timestamp

Owners can change a rig's trust level directly from this panel. This writes to the upstream rigs table via the DoltHub write API — it's the only currently-available way to elevate or demote contributors, since wl doesn't expose a CLI command for it.

Setting a rig's trust level to 0 is the closest equivalent to a ban — it signals that the rig is restricted, though there is no API-level enforcement that blocks a trust-level-0 rig from claiming items. See Moderation for the full escalation workflow.

Delete wasteland

The existing Delete section in settings keeps its danger styling. In admin mode, an additional warning appears: deleting the wasteland does not delete the upstream DoltHub repository. To fully decommission, you must also archive or delete the <owner>/<db> repo on DoltHub.