Terms of Service

[Marcus]

TERMS OF SERVICE OF EXILIAN
Last updated 31 December 2017 by Glaurung

Contents
1. General
2. User Accounts
3. Hate Speech
4. Spamming
5. Flaming and abuse
6. Piracy
7. Illegal Activity
8. Inappropriate Content
9. Evading Bans
10. E-Mail Address
11. Copyright of posts
12. Conclusion

1. General
'We', 'us' and 'our' refer to Exilian, its user community, and staff acting on their behalf.

By using the Exilian forums you agree to comply with our Terms of Service, as set out here, and to comply with your country or state's laws. If you break these Terms, we may delete your account, or apply penalties such as warnings, bans, and IP bans. We may also edit or delete your posts to remove text or other content that violates these Terms. If we are unable to enforce our Terms of Service, it does not give you the right to disregard them.

We are committed to the following principles:
• Ensuring a welcoming atmosphere that fosters friendships between members
• Maintaining individual privacy for each member
• Complying with existing laws
• Encouraging freedom of expression

Activities contrary to these principles are not permitted; the following sections set out various specific categories.

When violations of the Terms of Service occur, we use a points-based system (known as "violation points", with the record of such being a member's "violation record") as a broad measure of a member's conduct. The points values or tariff given in the following sections are the maximum applying for each type of violation. Accumulating points may result in penalties of increasing severity. The current penalty system is set out in a thread in our Active Legislation section.
Banned members can access the "Grand Tribunal" subforum: https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?board=80.0
If you wish to appeal against a ban or other penalty, post a thread explaining why you think your penalty was unfair and explaining the details of the case (there is a guide to doing this in the Grand Tribunal). If you have been IP banned, you do not have the right to appeal via this method due to the severity of your offences.

2. User Accounts
The following are violations of the Terms of Service, and may result in the following maximum penalties, regardless of whether data was lost or stolen:
• Hacking or attempting to hack other members' accounts (max tariff 8 points)
• Exploiting or attempting to exploit bugs in the forum software or loopholes in the Terms of Service (max tariff 3 points)
• Impersonating or attempting to impersonate a member of our staff (max tariff 4 points)
• Using a user name that we deem offensive or inappropriate for this forum (max tariff 2 points)

You are responsible for the security of your account: it is your fault if you willingly or accidentally give out your password. You are responsible for all posts written using your account, unless your account has been hacked. If you create an account with an offensive or inappropriate username, we may ask you to rename your account; we reserve the right to forcibly rename, or to terminate, accounts whose usernames do not comply with the Terms of Service.

If we have reasonable grounds to believe that an account is an automated spambot, we may delete the account and all its posts without warning or recourse to the tribunal.

3. Hate Speech
We are committed to maintaining a friendly atmosphere amongst all our members. We recognise that some viewpoints are not conducive to this, and as such the following are banned on the grounds of being hate speech:
• Promoting or taking part in any harmful discrimination or antagonism on the grounds of race, sex, gender, disability, or sexuality
• Promoting fascist, extremist, and ultranationalist ideologies and movements
• Promoting slavery
• Promoting cruelty towards humans or animals
• Severe antagonism, intimidation, or extreme discrimination - or the promotion thereof - on the grounds of private religious and political beliefs

All of these violations have a maximum tariff of 5 points.

Publicly supporting or advertising any website that promotes hate speech will also be considered as a hate speech violation.

4. Spamming
Spamming is the act of disrupting discussions or areas of the forum either for personal gain or to antagonise other members. The following are considered spamming, except when relevant posts are made in a section of the forum explicitly permitting them:
• Posts seriously unsuited to the area of the forum they are posted in
• Politically sensitive posts outside the relevant areas
• Posts that are unintelligible or in all capitals
• Repeated posts in a language other than English, except where this is explicitly permitted
• Flooding the forum with the same message
• Posts whose main purpose appears to be increasing a post count
• Inciting a forum war or riot
• Advertising commercial products in inappropriate areas
• Parasitic messages (e.g. chain letters)
• Posting links for free products (e.g. iPods, computers)

Spamming has a maximum tariff of 3 points.

5. Flaming and abuse
Flaming is the action of attacking another member verbally; it may result in penalties regardless of any provocation that may have taken place. Flaming includes but is not restricted to the following:
• Insults against a member
• Revealing, alleging, or purporting to reveal, in a negative or harmful fashion, strictly private information about a member (such as their sexuality, gender, identity, or medical status)
• Making threats to a member
• Libel against a member
• Any abusive posting about a member in a manner likely to cause harm

Posting about a person who is not an Exilian member in an abusive or invasive manner may also be considered flaming.
Flaming has a maximum tariff of 6 points.
Note that making an insult against a member may be regarded as both flaming and hate speech, resulting in violation points being applied for both.

6. Piracy
"Piracy" is the illegal copying and/or distribution of copyrighted content including, but not limited to, games, software, music, movies, pictures, ROMs, abandon-ware, and leaked software. "Cracks" are programs that disable copy-protection technology; "Multiplayer Hacks" are any programs, patches, files, modifications or information exposure cheats that allow a player to gain an unfair advantage over opponents in a multiplayer game; a "Key" is a combination of numbers and letters that is required for software installation and sometimes used to validate users for online play; and "Key-Generators" are programs that generate valid Keys.

You are not allowed to encourage the use of the above, to post on the forums about the above, or to create any of the above on Exilian. You are also not allowed to share techniques on how to make cracks, or locations where cracks may be obtained. The following are therefore considered as violations of the Terms of Service:
• Posting locations where cracks, hacks, key-generators and any pirated material can be obtained
• Seeking help on finding or creating cracks or key-generators
• Asking for files larger than 10 MB of a game that normally comes with installation media (exceptions include: Main exe file. File size may be adjusted depending on what the purpose is.)
• Posting about possessing, creating, using, or distributing pirated material.
• Posting links to pirated material

All of these violations carry a maximum tariff of 4 points.

7. Illegal activity
You may not use the Exilian forums to conduct, direct, plan, or encourage illegal activities as determined by the laws of the United States of America and the laws of the United Kingdom. Exilian may contact the appropriate authorities if such illegal activity is discovered.

8. Inappropriate Content
• Excessive swearing is not permitted. We understand that you use swear words once in a while but please don't abuse our trust. You should not post links to the swear word you are trying to use to bypass the consequences. We may use a swear filter, but this does not exonerate you from having posted the words, even if they have been removed or replaced by it. (max tariff 3 points)
• You may not post pornographic content - that is to say, images, video, and audio with a highly sexual content. This is not limited to heterosexual pornographic content; less explicit sexual content and nudity may be penalised at a lower level depending on context. (max tariff 4 points)
• You may not post violent or shocking images and videos - specifically those with excessive levels of violence and bloodshed, or those showing deeply disturbing events such as suicide or murder. (max tariff 5 points)

9. Evading Bans
• You may not avoid a ban by creating a new account. Duplicate accounts created to avoid bans will be deleted, and will result in a maximum further tariff of 5 points on the original account's violation record.
• If a staff member has edited your post to remove content, you may not edit it to re-create your original post. (max tariff 2 points)
• You may not post messages on behalf of a banned member. (max tariff 2 points)

10. E-mail Address
You must have a valid e-mail address registered at Exilian at all times, in case we need to send a warning or other message. Exilian will never give out your e-mail address to other people without your consent. If a message sent to your account bounces you will be banned and will have to contact a staff member to be unbanned; your e-mail address will then be verified before you are unbanned.

11. Copyright of Posts
When making posts on Exilian, you retain copyright over all work you post here. Exilian members and staff do not monetise or personally benefit from work you post, and you keep complete creative and legal control of it. We only use your work in the ways stated below.

By posting on the Exilian forums, you license us, non-exclusively, to host the material you post on Exilian. You agree that if you want any given post removed, you are responsible for doing so via the forum functionality or by requesting that specific posts are deleted by providing the serial number of those posts to a relevant member of staff, and that whilst we may agree to delete specific posts on your behalf, we are not obliged to do so. You further agree that you are not able to request block deletion of posted content, that measures we take for data security such as backups may mean we retain non-public copies of posts after you delete them, that we may retain copies of deleted posts for the purposes of informing and enforcing our terms of service and other site rules, that we are not responsible for further copying of your work by third parties as a result of our hosting your work, and that other members quoting your posts is a permissible use of that content on their and our part. You may request, if you choose to delete your account, that any posts associated with your account are appropriately anonymised for example by the removal of your username from them, and we will comply with any such request within a reasonable time frame.

We may use your work (including text and images posted) to help promote either your work or our support infrastructure, such as the website. This may include us putting it in our newsletters, including it in emails, or posting it on our social media accounts. By posting material on Exilian, the assumption made is that you are happy for us to do this. If you do not wish for us to use your work in this way, you can withdraw part or all of this implied agreement at any time for any or all material by communicating with us by personal message to relevant members of staff, emailing us, or simply stating within a given post that you do not wish for your content to be used in this way.

12. Conclusion
Exilian is a non-commercial site staffed by volunteers. We cannot guarantee that these Terms of Service are completely respected: some of our staff members may be under the age to be bound by legal contracts; furthermore, we don't have any lawyers so we can't be sure that we will be able to enforce our Terms of Service. We will not intentionally violate our Terms of Service, but we cannot be held responsible for violations.