SoylentNews Policy New

Privacy, Copyright, Disclaimers, Terms of Use, and DMCA (07 Dec 2024)

The following pages may be revised and/or amended from time to time

The SoylentNews site is currently based in the United States and is registered in the State of Oregon. As such, it is important to state the policy of SoylentNews with respect to certain laws in effect there as well as internationally.

Privacy Policy

It is the policy of SoylentNews, in as much as is reasonably possible, to retain the least amount of personally identifiable information about community members. Certain items are necessary in the conduct of the site's operation. These include, but are not necessarily restricted to: email address, IP data (either in plain or hashed form), and other personal information that users may optionally add to their own user page.

Copyright Notice

There are several places on the site where user-supplied content is published.

Submitted Stories

Anyone may submit a story for consideration by the editors for publication on the site. Editors attempt, within the site's guidelines (Submission_guidelines) to provide a consistent reading experience for the community. This may entail reformatting, rewriting, spelling corrections, and the like. The revised submission may then be published on the site for registered community members to read and comment on. Subsequent to publishing to the site additional edits may be made so as to correct mistakes (e.g. typos) and/or to add additional information, etc.

The original submitter retains copyright to their submission.

The original submitter grants a non-exclusive right to SoylentNews to publish the story.

Published Stories

SoylentNews retains copyright to the story as published on the site.

Journal Submissions

Each logged-in user has the ability to post "stories" to their journal in which they may discuss any topic they wish providing that it is permissible under US law. The submitter may edit (if they have the appropriate user permissions) or even delete any of their journal postings. Furthermore, they may restrict the ability of other users to comment in the journal as provided by the software.

The comments are owned by whoever posted them. SoylentNews is not responsible for them in any way. A statement to this effect will be displayed on each journal.

User Comments

The community is encouraged to provide comments in response to stories published on the site as well as to journal entries in which that option has been enabled. The site reserves the right to limit comments to some stories to logged-in users only, at its discretion. Comments may be submitted anonymously where such comments are enabled, as an Anonymous Coward, or attibuted the user's site Nickname.

In either case, the site's policy is stated on each story page:

The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Please note that comments are published under the Creative Commons Share Alike license [1]unless otherwise indicated.

Wiki Entries

Copyright on entries on the site's Wikipedia page are governed by this statement which appears at the bottom of each page:

Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license unless otherwise noted.

Further, when submitting to the Wiki, this notice appears above the "Save page", "Show Preview", and "Show changes" buttons:

Please note that all contributions to SoylentNews are considered to be released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license [2]. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!

IRC (Internet Relay Chat)

The submitter of anything posted to any of the site's IRC channels specifically allows the site to retain anything posted there and make it available, for example, in the form of retained logs. In addition, any chats that take place in the form of staff meetings, board meetings, and the like will be retained and may be posted on the site Wiki.

SoylentCode (rehash)

The site is based on Slashcode (Version unknown) which is under a GPL v2 license. Wherever possible, commensurate with maintaining site security, any new or updated code originated by SoylentNews will retain this licensing and be made available for downloading by any individual in accord with this license. Links will be maintained on the site to enable the repository of the code to be easily located.

Disclaimers

• Content published on this website is for general information purposes only.
• SoylentNews offers no representations or warranties of any kind, expressed or implied, regarding completeness, accuracy, reliability, suitability or availability of this website, published information and related graphics or hyperlinks contained on this website for any purpose. Use of such information is therefore at your own risk.
• In no event shall SoylentNews or its affiliates be held liable for any losses or damages including without limitation, indirect or consequential loss or damage, or any loss or damage whatsoever arising from loss of data or revenue arising out of, or in connection with, the use of this website.
• SoylentNews has no control over the nature, content, and availability of hyperlinked websites. The inclusion of hyperlinks to other websites is for reference or informative purposes only and does not imply endorsement of them.
• Availability is not guaranteed. SoylentNews takes no responsibility for, and will not be liable for, this website being unavailable for any reason.

Terms of Use

Use of this website is subject to your agreement with the following terms, as well as your agreement with the Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, and Disclaimer. You should review these terms and related documents regularly as they may be revised at any time without notice.

The date that these terms were last modified can be found at the top of the page.

• Use of this website and any disputes arising out of such use of this website are subject to the laws of the United States of America, and where applicable, the State of Oregon.
• All registered trademarks reproduced remain property of their respective owners.
• Unauthorized use of this website may give rise to a claim for damages and/or be a criminal offense.
• This website includes links to third party websites. These links are provided for your convenience to provide further information, and does not signify endorsement.
• Availability of this website is not guaranteed.
• Spamming, hacking and/or phishing this website is not permitted.
• Doxxing of community members is strictly forbidden regardless of the source of the information. Wherever personal information is published by anyone other than the person that it relates to it will be assumed to be accurate and may be assessed as being an attempt at doxxing.
• These terms, as well as terms in the related documents, shall remain continuously in force if there is a change to the domain of this website.

Subscription Fees

Community Fees

The Board may choose to offer a subscription membership fee to some or all members of the SoylentNews community. Nevertheless, non-payment of the subscription fee will not prevent access to the site; the intention is to enable the site to be viewed by as many people as possible and to encourage them to submit stories for publication and to comment on the stories that have already been accepted and released.

Waiving of Subscription Fees

Once an individual has served as a staff member for 3 months he is no longer required to pay subscription fees to enjoy all the privileges of site membership. This privilege will remain for the period of their service on the staff, plus a discretionary extension of a maximum of 1 year from the individual leaving the staff. The actual duration will be decided by the Management Group (MG) (which comprises of Administrators and Team Leaders (TLs)).

Occasionally, the Management Group (MG) might recommend to the Board that an individual be granted lifetime site membership in recognition of a significant period of service, or being a prominent figure from any relevant field of technology or related interests, or some other act deserving of special recognition. The Board can accept or reject such recommendations as they deem fit.

Site Control and Security

Access to Personal Data

No personal data held by the site will be shared, sold or otherwise distributed outside of the site with the exception of demands supported by the appropriate legal documentation served upon the Board.

Personal data shall be held by the site for the minimum time necessary, and efforts should be made to anonymize or encrypt such data wherever possible.

Abusive Behaviour

SoylentNews aims to be tolerant of any individual's personal views and will allow them to express their views in the comments of published stories. However, occasionally, individuals will not express their views relating to a story but will employ offensive and/or abusive behaviour towards an individual. This is not in the spirit of the site and a graduated response will be adopted to anyone who employs such behaviour in their comments.

• The moderation system employed usually results in offensive, abusive or off-topic information being reduced to the lowest viewable priority level such that, to most regular users of the site, it does not even display on their screen. Often, this is sufficient to defuse the situation and the offender departs after a short period of time. However, community members should also be encouraged not to 'feed the trolls' and to avoid responding to any posts by the offender. Staff should adopt a non-confrontational attitude while engaging with community members and the offender in an attempt to cool the situation down.

• A member of staff should issue a comment in which he politely but firmly requests that the offender stops his offensive/abusive behaviour while explaining that it does nothing to contribute to the site nor does it show the offender in a positive light. However, it is important to try to identify the true cause of the offenders attitude and for the staff member, alone or with the assistance of other members of staff, to try to resolve any genuine issues or grievances that the offender may have.

• A Team Leader or senior staff member should attempt to engage the offender in a private communication (either IRC/PM, email or whatever) and warn the offender that there could be serious consequences if the offender continues with his current course of action.

• The offender should be encouraged to submit a formal complaint by email to the Board using the "admin@soylentnews.org" email address. A formal complaint cannot be submitted anonymously but it may use a secure or temporary email provider. The Board shall then decide how the formal complaint should be resolved.

• The MG can agree to ban the offender for a specific period or permanently and take action to do so. There are, of course, technical difficulties associated with effectively banning an individual but a block of his personal IPs for each computer system as and when they are identified might be considered as a reasonable action. Other measures may be taken as necessary.

• Persistent site abuse, when all of the above measures have been exhausted, may result in the abuse being removed from display.

Control of SPAM

SPAM is most often found in story submissions (either as a link in an submission or as the entire contents of a submission) or in the comments to a published story. The definition of SPAM is that provided by Wikipedia and can be found in the Definitions and Common Terms.

Control of Access and Password Policy

No-one should be given access privileges above those which are essential for them to complete their role. Additionally, no single individual should have a unique set of privileges because, in the event of some unforeseen circumstance, no other individual will be able to fulfill the same role. TLs should ensure that each task for which his team is responsible is documented and that privileges are assigned to team members as required.

In the event of a member of staff permanently leaving then a SuperAdmin is responsible for ensuring that access privileges are removed for that individual promptly. Shared passwords known by the individual, where they exist, should also be changed.

Response to Denial Of Service (DOS) Attack

The management and control of a Denial of Service (DOS) attack is the responsibility of the Systems Team, and may be more detailed by listing actions to be taken by one or more teams.