Terms & Conditions
General Rules
Age Requirement: You certify that you are 13 years of age or older. Individuals under 13 years of age need a full release form from their parents before posting any material, in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 2000 (COPPA).
Content Responsibility: All content posted on this site is the sole opinion and responsibility of the poster.
Content License: When you add any content to our system, you are granting a non-exclusive, soft license to the site to use it. You reserve all rights for any other use of your material.
Right to Post: You must hold the rights to post any content in any form on our system. If you are not the copyright holder of the content (photograph, text, etc.), you must ensure it is public domain content or that you have permission to use it.
Personal Exposure: Posting another member’s personal details or electronic details (emails, social networking links, etc.) without permission will result in a ban.
Moderation: All material may be moderated or removed for foul language and commercialized promotional posts.
Respect: Always be respectful of other users, the system, and the moderators.
Prohibited Content: Links to adult content, pages with links to adult content, counterfeit documents, or material describing anything against internationally accepted laws will be removed.
Liability: You agree not to hold [Your Website Name] or its members liable for anything stated within the forums or blog posts.
Legal Compliance: In the event of a court order or request from legitimate authorities, [Your Website Name] will cooperate and divulge information such as IP addresses and email addresses. In other cases, we will protect our members and their privacy as much as possible.
Content Responsibility: You are responsible for your own posts and content uploaded, including any repercussions faced by uploading any content.
Content Backup: [Your Website Name] is not liable for loss of content and strongly recommends having a backup of photos and written content before uploading it onto the site.
Prohibited Actions: Claims of action, flames, and calls to action against any company or person may be removed on a case-by-case basis.
Relationship Requests: [Your Website Name] does not allow direct 'relationship' requests—there are many 'dating websites' available specifically for this purpose.
Email Addresses: Do not post email addresses in forum posts or blog entries. Moderators will remove these when seen to protect your privacy from spammers.
Commercial Promotion: Commercial or self-promotion (i.e., backlinks, logos as profile photos, or the like) may be blocked if it detracts from the site, at the discretion of volunteer moderators and administrators.
Personal Information: Insults and/or exposure of personal information should not be made where the individual is identifiable. Do not upload photos of people and negatively comment on them if that person is identifiable. Do not post the full name (or give information that would make them easily identifiable) of someone and then proceed to insult or reveal details of their private lives without permission.
Respectful Content: Do not post content that is derogatory or demeans another person’s race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or other status.
Website Functionality: We recommend using modern browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or IE9 onward for the best experience. We cannot guarantee the highest quality experience with alternate browsers.
Photos and Videos
Ownership: You may only upload media to the website where you are the owner or copyright holder of the media or have explicit permission from the copyright holder.
Compromising Situations: Photos should not be uploaded if they are of other people in compromising situations (unless with permission).
Explicit Content: Nude, pornographic, or explicit images should not be uploaded. Exceptions can be made (e.g., tribal dress), but photos that break these rules will be removed at the moderator's discretion.
Inflammatory Captions: Photos of people with insulting or inflammatory captions should not be added. Moderators may remove such photos without notice.
Forum Rules
Clarity: Be descriptive, specific, and succinct in your forum postings.
Forum Charter: Before posting in a forum, please read the charter for that forum.
Content Insertion: No press releases, newsletters, web pages, images, or copyrighted content may be inserted into posts. Minor fair use excerpts of less than one paragraph (4 sentences) may be used if the content is publicly available. A link to the content is acceptable and appropriate.
Promotional URLs: Do not drop promotional URLs, signature files, nor specifics that would lead people to commercial sites.
Clean Language: Please keep your language clean and decent, including avoiding personal inflammatory language and obscenities.
Stay On Topic: Please stay within the topic of the forum you are posting in and within any topic that another poster may have started.
Location Accuracy: Choose a location as close to the actual location as possible.
Respect: Treat others the way you wish to be treated. Flaming or personal attacks are not allowed or tolerated.
Advertisements: The forums and journals are not a venue for advertisements. It is at the sole discretion of [Your Website Name] and its moderators what constitutes an advertisement.
Moderator Actions: Discussions about moderator or administrator actions are welcome in email or private messages but should not be discussed in public forums.
Post Language: All forum posts should be in English to ensure appropriate moderation.
Privacy and Respect
Private Accounts: Private accounts, names, and blog entries are "best effort" only. We will attempt to keep them out of the public version of the site but offer no guarantees.
Private Material: No photos, text, or videos that need to be private should be posted on [Your Website Name] regardless of account settings.
Admin Access: Administrators have access to all material posted on the site, though this access is used sparingly.
Respect: We will do our best to protect your privacy and respect your posts, messages, and blog entries. We will not edit or misrepresent what you write without cause.
Email Privacy: We will protect your email address from spam and not sell it.
Advertising: We use third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. For more information, please see our Full Privacy Policy.
Copyright and Ownership
Posting Rights: Posting on www.thedancosta.com grants us a non-exclusive royalty-free right to display your photos and journals.
Copyright: You maintain copyright of all your photos and text. This means they can be republished where and when you choose.
Content Management: You maintain the right to remove or edit blog entries at any time.
Joint Accounts: For joint accounts with two or more owners, the primary email holder has the final say on content usage, deletion, etc.
Media Uploads: You may only upload media to the website where you are the owner or copyright holder of the media or have explicit permission from the copyright holder. Fair-use laws apply for public domain and summarized content.
Ownership: All media you add to [Your Website Name] remains your property. No title of ownership passes to [Your Website Name].
Content Sale: We will not sell your content beyond the website without your express permission.
Promotion: You grant [Your Website Name] a non-exclusive, royalty-free license to redistribute and publish your content on the website and third-party sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc., giving due credit to the blogger.
Promotional Use: We may use screenshots of your content for promotional purposes with appropriate attribution.
Partner Sites: We reserve the right to distribute content to partner sites with correct credit to your account.
Advertising
Ad Placement: We will place discreet ads alongside much of the content you post.
Ad Quality: We will make our best effort to ensure that advertising is in context, tasteful, and respectful of our members' varying views.