Terms of Service

Last updated

This document is a working draft.

Some details below are still marked [TODO] and have not been settled yet. It has not been reviewed by a lawyer. If something here matters to a decision you are making, ask us before relying on it.

These terms are an agreement between you and [TODO: legal entity name] ("Board Hogs", "we", "us") covering your use of the Board Hogs website and services. By creating an account or using Board Hogs, you accept them.

Board Hogs is a community catalog for surfboards, the people who shape them, and the places they are ridden. Much of what you put into it is published on pages that anyone can read. Section 4 explains exactly what that means, and it is the section to read if you read only one.

1. Who may use Board Hogs

You must be at least 13 years old to use Board Hogs, and at least 16 if you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom. If you are under the age of majority where you live, you may use Board Hogs only with the involvement of a parent or guardian who agrees to these terms on your behalf.

You must not use Board Hogs if we have previously terminated your account, or if doing so would break a law that applies to you.

2. Your account

You need an account to add boards, add board–spot stories, keep a session diary, write reviews, or list a board. You are responsible for keeping your password secure and for everything done through your account.

Your username appears in your public profile URL. Some usernames are reserved for parts of the site, and we may reclaim a username that impersonates a real person, a shaper, or a brand you are not authorised to represent.

Tell us promptly if you believe someone else has access to your account.

3. Content you post stays yours

You keep every right you already had in the boards, board–spot stories, photos, session notes, reviews, comments, suggested catalog edits, and anything else you add to Board Hogs. We do not claim ownership of it.

You are responsible for what you post. By posting it you confirm that you own it or have permission to post it, and that publishing it on Board Hogs does not infringe anyone else's rights. A photo of a board someone else took is theirs, not yours, unless they have given you permission.

4. The licence you grant us

So that Board Hogs can actually display your content, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sublicensable licence to host, store, reproduce, resize, crop, adapt, publish, publicly display, and distribute the content you post, for the purpose of operating and promoting Board Hogs.

That licence is bounded by the visibility settings you choose. A private board, private board–spot story, and private session are not published; public versions and reviews are. A story on a private board remains private. Changing a setting changes what the licence authorises us to display going forward.

This licence specifically covers the things Board Hogs is built to do with your content:

  • Render it on public, search-engine-indexable pages — your profile, board pages, shaper and board model pages, and surf spot pages — to visitors who are not signed in.
  • Resize and crop photos you upload into smaller versions for faster loading.
  • Include it in aggregate and derived statistics, such as which boards are ridden in which conditions at which spots. Aggregates are computed across many users and do not identify you individually.
  • Cache it at our hosting provider's edge network and in search engine indexes, which means a change or deletion can take time to disappear everywhere.
  • Show it in the activity feed and elsewhere in Board Hogs where your public activity is surfaced to other surfers.

5. What is public, and what that implies

Public pages on Board Hogs are rendered for anonymous visitors and listed in sitemaps we submit to search engines. That is the product working as intended: the point of a public quiver is that people can find it.

Two practical consequences follow, and neither is something we can undo for you. Search engines and archiving services may keep copies of a page after you have changed or deleted its contents. And anyone who can see a page can copy what is on it.

Post accordingly. The privacy policy describes the controls available to you and exactly what each one does.

6. Acceptable use

You agree not to use Board Hogs to do any of the following.

  • Post content you do not have the rights to, including photographs taken by someone else.
  • Impersonate another person, or claim to represent a shaper, brand, or business without authority to do so.
  • List a board for sale or trade that you do not own or cannot lawfully sell, or misrepresent its condition, history, or provenance.
  • Publish the location of a spot that a user has deliberately kept hidden, or otherwise work around another user's privacy settings.
  • Post content that harasses, threatens, or defames another person, or that is unlawful, hateful, or sexually explicit.
  • Submit deliberately false catalog edits, reviews, or ratings, including reviews of your own products and coordinated rating campaigns.
  • Scrape, crawl, or bulk-download Board Hogs, or access it through automated means, except for search engine crawlers obeying our robots.txt.
  • Probe, scan, or attempt to defeat the authentication, access controls, or rate limits of the service.
  • Use Board Hogs to send spam or unsolicited commercial messages to other users.

7. Reporting and takedown

Any signed-in user can report a board, with a reason, from the board's page. Reports go to a moderation queue that we review. There is not yet an in-app report button for reviews, comments, sessions, photos, or profiles — to report any of those, or anything else, email us at the address in section 15.

We may hide or remove content, and suspend or terminate an account, when we conclude that these terms have been broken — and we may do so without prior notice where the content is unlawful or the risk of harm is immediate. We are not obliged to monitor content, and choosing not to act on one report is not a waiver of the right to act on another.

Where content is attached to other content that we remove, the attached content may be removed, hidden, or retained, depending on the circumstances.

If you believe we have removed something in error, write to us at the address in section 15.

9. Shaper and brand pages

Shaper and brand pages are part of Board Hogs's catalog. They exist whether or not the shaper has an account, and we maintain them as reference pages.

You may claim a page for a shaper or brand you represent. When you submit a claim you represent that you are authorised by that business to act for it. We verify claims by hand before granting them.

A verified claim lets you edit your page and review the edits other surfers suggest for it. It does not transfer ownership of the page, of the catalog entry, or of the content other users have contributed about your boards. Other users may continue to review your boards and suggest corrections, and honest reviews are not removed because the subject dislikes them.

We may revoke a claim at any time, including where the claim turns out to be unauthorised, where the business changes hands, or where the page is being used for something other than maintaining accurate information.

10. The catalog is provided as-is

Board Hogs's catalog of shapers, board models, and surf spots is assembled from open and third-party sources — including Wikidata, Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and shapers' own websites — and parts of it are generated or summarised automatically. Surfers correct it through the suggest-an-edit flow.

We work at it, but we do not warrant that any of it is accurate, complete, or current. Dimensions, volumes, model histories, spot locations, and descriptions may all be wrong.

Some catalog images come from third parties under their own licences, and are shown with the credit that licence requires. Those images are not ours to relicense: if you want to reuse one, the credit on the page tells you whose terms apply.

Nothing on Board Hogs is safety information. Spot pages describe waves; they do not tell you whether it is safe to paddle out, and they are not a forecast, a hazard assessment, or local knowledge. Surfing is dangerous and you are responsible for your own judgement in the water.

11. Boards listed for sale or trade

Board Hogs lets you flag a board in your quiver as for sale or open to trade, and lets other surfers browse those boards by location. That is the whole of the feature.

We do not process payments, hold funds, provide escrow, verify the identity of either party, verify that a board exists or is as described, or take any part in arranging or completing a transaction. Any deal you make is between you and the other person, off Board Hogs, at your own risk.

You are responsible for the accuracy of your listing and for complying with any law that applies to your sale, including consumer protection and tax obligations.

Board Hogs does not currently charge for anything and has no paid plan. If that changes, these terms will be updated before it does.

12. Third-party services and links

Board Hogs runs on infrastructure operated by other companies and links out to shapers' websites and other third-party pages. We do not control those services or sites and are not responsible for them. The privacy policy lists the providers that process your data.

13. Suspension and termination

You may stop using Board Hogs at any time. Account deletion is currently handled by hand — the privacy policy explains how to request it and what it does.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you break these terms, if your use exposes us or other users to legal risk, or if we stop operating the service. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will tell you first.

Sections covering your content licence for content already published, disclaimers, limitation of liability, and indemnity survive termination.

14. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

Board Hogs is provided "as is" and "as available". To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, and any warranty that the service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, neither [TODO: legal entity name] nor anyone working with us is liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or the cost of substitute services. Our total liability arising out of or relating to Board Hogs is limited to [TODO: liability cap amount].

Some jurisdictions do not allow these exclusions, in which case they apply to you only as far as the law permits.

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless against claims, damages, and reasonable legal costs arising from content you post, from your use of Board Hogs, or from your breach of these terms.

15. Changes, governing law, and contact

We may update these terms. The date at the top of this page always reflects the current version, and we will give notice of material changes through the service. Continuing to use Board Hogs after a change means you accept the updated terms.

These terms are governed by the laws of [TODO: governing jurisdiction], without regard to conflict-of-laws rules, and you and we submit to the courts of that jurisdiction. Nothing here removes a consumer protection you have under the mandatory law of the country you live in.

If any part of these terms is unenforceable, the rest stays in force. Our not enforcing something is not a waiver of it. You may not transfer your rights under these terms; we may transfer ours to a successor.

Questions, notices, and requests go to [TODO: contact email].