Acceptable use policy

This policy applies to everyone who uses Wordfolk, whether or not you have an account, and it forms part of the terms of service.

It exists because Wordfolk is small and moderated by hand. Almost nobody who reads this will ever come close to breaking it. The rules below describe the handful of behaviours that make a hand-moderated directory unworkable, not a general suspicion of the people using one.

The submission guidelines are a separate thing: they set the editorial bar for whether a blog is a good fit. A blog can be perfectly acceptable under this policy and still be declined as not right for the directory.

Do not submit, link to, or publish through Wordfolk any content that:

• is unlawful, or promotes or facilitates unlawful activity;
• infringes copyright, trade marks, or any other right belonging to somebody else;
• harasses, threatens, defames or impersonates a person, or incites others to;
• attacks people on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, disability, sex, gender identity or sexual orientation;
• sexualises children in any way, or is sexually explicit material presented without warning in a general-audience directory;
• contains malware, phishing pages, or anything designed to deceive a visitor into giving up credentials or money;
• publishes somebody's private information (a home address, a phone number, an identity document) without their consent.

This applies to the blog you submit as well as to what you type into our forms. Linking to something is publishing it here.

Wordfolk works because a person reads every submission and takes it in good faith. So:

• Do not misrepresent who owns a blog. You may submit a blog you do not own, and recommending someone else's writing is encouraged, and always has been. What you may not do is imply that it is yours, which matters because only a blog's submitter can buy a Featured placement for it.
• Do not submit the same blog repeatedly after it has been declined, unless something has genuinely changed. Resubmitting is welcome when it has.
• Do not submit in bulk. Wordfolk is a directory of blogs somebody thought were worth reading, not an index of everything.
• Do not use submissions for link building. A listing that exists to point search engines at a commercial site is spam, whatever it is dressed as.
• Do not use the report feature to attack a competitor. Reports are read by a person; filing them in bad faith wastes the only moderation resource this site has.

Do not:

• create accounts to get around a suspension, a rate limit, or a declined submission;
• use a disposable or throwaway email service to create an account;
• share your account with somebody else, or sell or transfer it;
• attempt to inflate an endorsement count, a click count, or any other number on the site;
• interfere with the service's operation, or with anybody else's use of it;
• use Wordfolk to send unsolicited bulk email, or to harvest addresses from guest-post listings. Owner contact details are shown to signed-in members so that a writer can pitch a post. Using them for anything else is a breach of this policy and, in most countries, of the law.

Wordfolk has no public API, and there is no crawler exception for commercial use.

• Search engines are welcome. Our robots file says what is open, and following it is all that is asked.
• Do not scrape the directory to build a dataset, republish the listings, or train a model on them. The listings are a hand-curated collection and copying them wholesale is the one thing that would make curating them pointless.
• Do not send automated traffic through the outbound links. Those clicks are counted and reported to the blogs listed here, so inflating them misleads a third party, not us.
• Do not attempt to defeat the rate limits or the bot check. They exist because the alternative is a directory full of spam.

If you want the data for research or something similarly non-commercial, ask. We would rather talk about it than find out from the logs.

If you have found a security problem, we want to hear about it, and we will not pursue you for finding it in good faith.

Good faith means: you did not access, modify or keep anybody else's data beyond the minimum needed to demonstrate the issue; you did not degrade the service for other people; you did not run automated scanning that amounts to a denial-of-service attempt; and you told us before telling anybody else, giving us a reasonable chance to fix it.

Report it to hello@wordfolk.app and describe what you found and how to reproduce it. There is no bug-bounty programme and no payment, but we will acknowledge your report and credit you if you would like that.

If you see something here that breaks this policy, tell us.

• Listings. Signed-in members can report a blog directly from its card, choosing dead link, wrong category, spam, or inappropriate, with an optional note.
• Comments. Signed-in members can report someone else's comment from the Report link under it, choosing spam, harassment, or inappropriate, with an optional note.
• Anything else, or if you would rather not use the form: email hello@wordfolk.app with a link and a short description of the problem.
• Copyright and legal complaints follow their own process, on the content removal page.

A person reads every report. We will not always tell you the outcome, because that often means discussing another person's account, but nothing is discarded unread.

What we do depends on what happened and whether it looks deliberate. Roughly, in order:

• We fix it. Most of what turns up is a mistake, such as a miscategorised blog or an out-of-date link, and we simply correct it.
• We get in touch. For a first, non-serious breach, we will normally write to you and ask you to put it right.
• We remove the listing. Where content breaks the rules above, it comes down. If a paid placement was running on it, see the refunds policy for what happens to the remaining days.
• We suspend or close the account. For a serious breach, or a repeated one after we have written to you.
• We report it. Where we are required to, or where content involves a credible threat to someone's safety, we will pass what we have to the relevant authority.

Serious or deliberate breaches (content involving children, credible threats, phishing, malware) skip straight to the end of that list without a warning first.

If we have removed your listing or closed your account and you think we got it wrong, email us and say so. Include the blog name and the address on the account, and tell us what you think happened.

A person will look at it again, and where we were wrong we will reverse it and say so. Where we were not, we will tell you the reason plainly rather than leaving you guessing.

A declined submission is an editorial judgement rather than an enforcement action, so it is not an appeal, but you are welcome to submit again if something material about the blog has changed.

Reports, appeals and questions about this policy: hello@wordfolk.app.