Terms of service

Wordfolk is referred to below as "we", "us" and "our", and "you" means anyone using the site.

Wordfolk is a directory of independent blogs. Visitors browse and search the directory, signed-in members save and endorse blogs and submit new ones for review, and the owner of an approved blog can pay for a Featured placement. Everything except that placement is free.

These terms are an agreement between you and us. By using Wordfolk (browsing it, creating an account, submitting a blog, or paying for a placement) you accept them. If you do not accept them, please do not use the site.

Some parts of the service have their own rules, and those rules form part of this agreement:

• Acceptable use policy: what you may and may not do here.
• Submission guidelines: the editorial bar a blog has to clear.
• Refunds policy: cancellation and refunds for Featured placements.
• Privacy policy and Cookie policy: what we do with personal data.
• Content removal: how to have something taken down.

Where one of those documents conflicts with these terms on a point it covers specifically, that document governs.

You must be at least 16 years old to create a Wordfolk account, and old enough in your own country to enter into a binding agreement. If you are using Wordfolk on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to accept these terms for it.

We do not ask for your date of birth and we do not attempt to verify your age. This is a condition of using the service, not something we check. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 16, we will close it and delete the personal data associated with it.

You need an account to submit a blog, save or endorse listings, report a problem, or buy a placement. Browsing the directory needs no account.

Registration requires a name, an email address and a password. We send a verification link to that address, and the account cannot be used to sign in until the link is followed, so the address has to be one you control. We do not accept addresses from disposable-mailbox providers.

You are responsible for keeping your password secret and for everything done through your account. Tell us promptly if you think someone else has gained access to it. Changing your password signs out every other session.

You may close your account at any time from your account settings. Closing it requires confirming through a link we email you, and it cannot be undone. See the privacy policy for exactly what closing an account does and does not remove.

The acceptable use policy sets out in detail what is not allowed here. In summary, you agree not to:

• submit a blog you have no honest connection to while implying that you own it;
• submit spam, or use submissions to build links to a commercial site;
• scrape, crawl or bulk-download the directory, or reach it by automated means beyond ordinary browsing;
• work around rate limits, the bot check, or the email-verification requirement;
• submit or link to content that is unlawful, harassing, or infringes someone else's rights;
• interfere with the operation or security of the service, or try to reach data that is not yours.

"Submissions" means anything you send us: a blog listing, a guest-post listing, your profile name and bio, a report about a listing, and messages sent through the contact form.

You keep what you own

You keep all rights in your submissions. Nothing in these terms transfers ownership of anything to us.

The licence you give us

So that we can actually run the directory, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store, reproduce, display, adapt for formatting, and distribute your submissions for the purpose of operating and promoting Wordfolk. That licence lasts as long as the submission is published and ends when it is removed, except for copies kept in backups and in our administrative records.

What you are promising

By submitting, you confirm that the information is accurate to the best of your knowledge, that you have the right to submit it, and that publishing it will not infringe anyone else's rights or break any law. You are responsible for what you submit; we do not verify it beyond the editorial review described below.

Blog descriptions may be edited for length, clarity, house style or accuracy before publication.

Every blog and guest-post listing is reviewed by a person before it appears publicly. A submission sits in a pending state until it is approved or rejected, and pending submissions are visible to nobody but you and us. The editorial standard is set out in the submission guidelines.

Review is editorial judgement, not a right. We may decline a submission for any reason consistent with those guidelines, and we may remove or amend a published listing at any time, including for a reason unrelated to anything you did, such as retiring a category.

Signed-in members can report a listing that is dead, miscategorised, spam, or inappropriate. Reports are read by a person. Reporting something is not a guarantee that it will be removed, and we do not report back on the outcome of every report.

To ask for a listing to be taken down, or to make a copyright or other legal complaint, use the content removal process.

Once a blog has been approved, the person who submitted it may pay to book it into a sponsored position by the week: the Sponsored section of the homepage, where it also takes turns in the sponsored positions of the directory and search, or the first position on its own category page.

A placement is a paid position, not an editorial endorsement, and it is labelled Sponsored. Paying for a placement does not change the editorial bar: only an already-approved blog can be featured, and a placement is not a way to skip or influence review.

A booking covers whole consecutive weeks, from one to 4. A week runs from Monday to Sunday in Coordinated Universal Time, and the first week you can book is the one after you book it. Booking again adds new weeks; it does not change a booking you already have.

Each week has a fixed number of positions: 4 on the homepage and 1 per category. A week that is full cannot be booked. The weeks you choose are held for 30 minutes while you complete payment, and released if you do not.

The fee is a single charge. There is no subscription and nothing renews automatically. Payment is taken by our payment provider, which acts as merchant of record for the sale, is the seller for tax purposes, and calculates any tax due from your own country at its checkout. We never see or store your card details.

A placement is granted only once our payment provider confirms the payment to us directly, rather than when your browser returns from checkout. If a payment succeeds but the blog it was bought for has been removed in the meantime, contact us and we will arrange a refund.

Cancellation and refunds are covered by the refunds policy.

Wordfolk is a directory of sites we do not control. We review a blog at the point it is submitted, but a site can change at any time afterwards, and we do not monitor listed blogs on an ongoing basis.

Following a link from here takes you to a third party's site, governed by that party's own terms and privacy policy. We are not responsible for the content, accuracy, availability, security or practices of any linked site, and a listing is not an endorsement of it. If a listed blog has become something we would not have accepted, please report it.

The design, text, code, illustrations and arrangement of Wordfolk are ours or our licensors', and are protected by copyright and other rights. You may link to any public page here freely. You may not copy the directory as a dataset, reproduce substantial parts of the site, or use our name or branding in a way that suggests we endorse you, without our written permission.

Blog names, descriptions and marks belonging to listed blogs remain their owners'.

We may suspend or close an account, remove a listing, or withdraw access to part or all of the service where you have broken these terms or the acceptable use policy, where the law requires it, or where doing so is necessary to protect other people or the service itself.

Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you why and give you a chance to put things right first. We will not do that where the breach is serious or deliberate, where telling you would prejudice an investigation, or where we are legally prevented from it.

If we close your account for a breach while a placement is running, the remaining days are not refunded. If we remove your blog for a reason unrelated to anything you did, we refund the unused days; see the refunds policy.

You can close your account at any time, for any reason, without telling us why.

Wordfolk is provided as it is and as available. We do not promise that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or secure against every attack; that listings are accurate or current; or that a linked blog is safe or suitable for you.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude all warranties, conditions and terms implied by statute or common law, including implied terms about satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, and accuracy.

Nothing here restricts a right you have as a consumer that cannot be restricted by agreement.

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that, we are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of goodwill, loss of data, or any indirect or consequential loss, however it arises.

Also subject to that, our total liability to you arising out of these terms or your use of Wordfolk is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim and fifty United States dollars.

We are not liable for anything caused by a third-party blog, by a payment provider, or by an event outside our reasonable control.

You agree to cover our reasonable losses, costs and legal fees arising from a third-party claim that your submissions, or your use of Wordfolk in breach of these terms, infringed that party's rights or broke the law. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and will not settle it without consulting you.

We may change these terms, to reflect a change to the service or a change in the law. The date at the top of this page always shows when the current version took effect, and previous versions are superseded by it.

For a minor change, continuing to use Wordfolk after the date shown means you accept the new terms. For a change that materially reduces your rights or increases your obligations, we will give reasonable notice by email to signed-in members before it takes effect, so that you can close your account first if you would rather not accept it.

If any part of these terms is found to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply, and that part is treated as replaced by the closest enforceable version of what it was trying to achieve.

If we do not enforce a right straight away, that is not a waiver of it, and it does not stop us enforcing it later.

You may not transfer your rights or obligations under these terms to anyone else. We may transfer ours to a business that takes over the running of Wordfolk, provided your rights are not reduced.

These terms, together with the documents listed above, are the whole agreement between you and us about Wordfolk. Nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce them.

Questions about these terms, or a formal notice under them: hello@wordfolk.app.