Terms of use and participants' rules
Participating in blogs, debates, Q&As and polls on the Tearfund site:
We welcome your participation in any interactive feature on our site, including posting comments to our blogs, submitting questions for a featured Q&A, adding your opinion to one of our debates, taking part in one of our polls or adding to our prayer wall. We want to hear your views in response to our debates and blogs and we will listen to your comments.
For the purpose of the Terms of Use, ‘post’ can refer to any interactive section of the website.
Due to the sensitivity of some of the locations we work in and the issues that we address, we may have to moderate all comments submitted. This is a precaution to ensure that we do not jeopardise our staff security. For this reason, there may be a delay between the submission of your comment and it appearing on the site. We will do our best to include your post as quickly as possible. We reserve the right to withhold any post, without further comment or notice to you.
We reserve the right to remove the access of any individual who has abused Tearfund’s web services, breached the Terms and Conditions, Terms of Use and/or persistently submitted inappropriate material.
Be aware that in exceptional circumstances Tearfund could be legally obliged to reveal your registration information and/or IP address to the authorities.
In order to participate in any interactive feature on this site, we ask that you observe the Terms of Use, including the following Participants' Rules. Site users are also governed by our website Terms and Conditions.
Participants’ rules
- Please be considerate of other participants’ access to and enjoyment of the post and avoid using slang or shorthand.
- People of all ages and backgrounds visit www.tearfund.org. Please do not use profanities or other words (including shorthand or substitutions) that might offend others.
- Do not post any material that is defamatory, obscene, indecent, lewd, pornographic, violent, abusive, insulting, threatening, harassing, discriminatory, blasphemous or otherwise unlawful or illegal. A defamatory comment is one that is capable of damaging the reputation of a person or organisation.
- Do not post anything that is or may be contempt of court (anything that risks prejudicing ongoing or forthcoming court proceedings) and avoid breaking any known court injunction.
- Do not incite people to commit any crime, including incitement of racial hatred.
- Do not post personal attacks on other participants.
- Do not impersonate other participants or public figures.
- Do not create multiple user identities for the purpose of abusing the services of this site or the experience of other users.
- No personal information please. It is not acceptable to publicise your or anyone else's contact details. This is for your own safety and that of everyone who uses this service.
- Please do not submit questions or comments of a personal nature to our bloggers, debaters or interviewees. We will consider these off topic and will not include them.
- No spamming or flooding.
- All posts should relate directly to the discussion topic.
- We reserve the right to terminate lengthy and involved discussions between a handful of people if we feel that this is having a negative impact on fellow participants' experience on the site.
- We reserve the right to post a representative comment or question if we have received a number of a similar nature.
- We reserve the right to edit comments for length.
- Occasionally, when discussions have become irrelevant to the post in question, we will close comments on that post, and we may delete comments already posted if they are unrelated to the topic, to reduce the size of the page for other users.
- Do not submit anything that may infringe others rights, including intellectual property rights.
- All submissions should be your own original work. Do not post content you have copied from someone else. On submitting content or comment, you warrant to us that your submission is your own original work and you acknowledge that any breach of this warranty may cause us damage or loss and you agree to indemnify us in full and permanently against any third party liabilities, claims, costs, loss or damage we incur as a result of including material you submit to us, including consequential losses.
- You grant us a non-exclusive, perpetual, royalty-free, worldwide licence to republish any material you submit to us in any format, including without limitation print and electronic format.
- No advertising or marketing or any kind, or posting of web links (URLs).
- Please do not respond to posts in order to make a general complaint or ask a general question about Tearfund. Instead use our contact us pages to direct your question to the relevant department.
- Our registration process may request that you supply us with your name and email details. We will only use this information to validate your access to the discussions and for other service administration purposes, unless you specifically opt in to receive further information from us.
- We will hold your personal data on our systems for as long as this service is provided, or until you request that we remove your details.
Suspension and termination
We will determine, in our discretion, whether there has been a breach of this acceptable use policy through your use of our site. When a breach of this policy has occurred, we may take such action as we deem appropriate.
Failure to comply with this acceptable use policy constitutes a material breach of the terms of use upon which you are permitted to use our site, and may result in our taking all or any of the following actions:
- Immediate, temporary or permanent withdrawal of your right to use our site.
- Immediate, temporary or permanent removal of any posting or material uploaded by you to our site.
- Issue of a warning to you.
- Legal proceedings against you for reimbursement of all costs on an indemnity basis (including, but not limited to, reasonable administrative and legal costs) resulting from the breach.
- Further legal action against you.
- Disclosure of such information to law enforcement authorities as we reasonably feel is necessary.
We exclude liability for actions taken in response to breaches of the terms of use. The responses described in this policy are not limited, and we may take any other action we reasonably deem appropriate.
