FAC Terms of Service & User Conduct Policy
FAC Terms of Service & User Conduct Policy
This policy was last updated July 12, 2009.
Fanart Central (hereafter referred to in first person, i.e. \"we\") is first and foremost an art and fanart gallery and online community. What follows is a code of etiquette and general terms regarding the use and participation of our site by visitors and registered users (hereafter referred to in second person, i.e. \"you\").
Summary of this Policy
If you read nothing else, then at least read this:
By signing up on our site, you implicitly agree to follow all of our rules, regardless of whether you even know what those rules are or have ever taken the time to read them. Please do! This will help avoid confusion later.
Please exhibit civil behavior while on our site. Disruptive behavior (spamming, trolling, harassment, etc.) is not tolerated and may warrant administrative action, up to and including termination of your user account. Specific rules and guidelines on this matter are explained at length in Section 2 of this policy.
Rules regarding what you can and can not submit to your Fanart Central user gallery are explained in our submission policy and not covered here.
Fanart Central contains material that some users may find offensive. We have a content labelling system in place to identify such content, which we explain separately in our Ratings Policy and not here.
Please contact a site staff member if you have any questions, or if you encounter any material or behavior which may be in violation of our rules, so that we can take an appropriate action.
0 - GENERAL TERMS
We reserve the right to update our site policies at any time, with or without notice to you. (We usually make an announcement of new policy changes before they go into effect, but this is no guarantee.) To avoid confusion over what is or is not official policy, each policy page will include at its top the date it was last updated. We want to avoid updating or changing our policies in a way that retroactively effects pre-established users or submissions, but again, this is not guaranteed and sometimes recent events may prompt immediate changes in stated policy or its enforcement.
NO WARRANTY. Availability of our site is subject to such mundane concerns such as network connections, limitations on available bandwidth or traffic (so-called \"Internet weather\") and/or occasional maintenance or downtime. We are not responsible or liable for any problems that may interfere with your ability to connect to and use our site; and while we do provide online storage of and access to submitted material, we are not a back-up or archiving service and are not responsible for any missing submissions or lost data.
Our site contains user submitted material, both in the forms of user submitted artistic works and user submitted commentary. Any opinions expressed in either form are the sole view of the person posting it and not representative of us or our site.
We reserve the right and ability to monitor any submitted content as we deem necessary, however we cannot monitor or screen all of it for compliance with our rules. We will take action to enforce our rules as it is brought to our attention, but it is your responsibility as an end user to inform us if and where there are violations. Also bear in mind that some minor situations or disputes between users, so-called 'isolated incidents' may resolve themselves in natural discourse and require no intervention from us.
We must reserve certain trivial rights over artistic material submitted to our site, namely the permission to distribute it (or derivative thumbnails) over the Internet to the end viewer -- our Submission Policy describes these in greater detail. Beyond this, all such material is still considered the property of its respective owner. We respect the rights of copyright owners over the work they create, and ask that you do the same.
We reserve the right to retain any material (image files or text commentary) submitted to our site, even material that has been later removed from view; it is not truly \"deleted\" from our site's database and will be freely accessible for historical and administrative review. As such, anything you post on our site can (and, if necessary, will) be visible to site administration.
1 - ACCOUNT REGISTRATION
Email: You must have a working e-mail address in order to participate on our site. Upon registering, we send a confirmation letter to the address you provided in order to verify it is authentic and that you are able to receive mail from our site using it. You will not be able to participate on our site without following the instructions contained in the confirmation letter. Please be aware that the message might be classified as 'junk mail' ('bulk mail', or 'spam') by your e-mail service and processed accordingly, so if you did not receive a confirmation letter, please double-check your e-mail folders and the email address you provided; you can then request a new confirmation letter to be sent here.
We also reserve the right to block certain email addresses entirely, for example those associated with so-called 'disposable' or 'throwaway' email services, if we deem such action necessary.
See also the section regarding account security, below.
Username: Your username must be non-offensive and appropriate for all ages. Usernames containing profanity, offensive slurs, or deemed similarly inappropriate may warrant an immediate termination of your account.
Please also be aware that you cannot change your username after registration. If you should desire a new username later on, you must register it as a new account. We do not consider voluntary name-switches to be a violation, but we do want to be notified of any such name changes so we can keep track of who is whom.
User Avatar and Profile Space: Your user avatar image and profile text space must be appropriate for all ages and may not include vulgar or offensive content (e.g. explicit depictions such as violence or sexual content), personal attacks or harassment.
Limit one account per user. Multiple accounts are not necessary nor permitted. If a multiple account is used to violate policies (so-called 'sock puppetry'), this can constitute reason for an immediate suspension or termination of the duplicate and/or original account(s), depending on the violations committed. This also means that we reserve the right to immediately and without warning terminate any accounts that are reasonably believed to have been created by a user with outstanding bans against them.
Account Security: YOU are the sole person responsible for the security of your account, including the security of your account password and email account (which can be used to reset your password). To avoid unauthorized access, you should log out after each session, especially if accessing our site through a public computer. If someone else is able to use your account in ways that violate our site rules, it is still your account and you will be held responsible for any damage.
Account Privacy. Please be aware that most of the information submitted to your user account profile (which can include, at your discretion, your registered email address) will be displayed on your public userpage and can be viewed by literally anyone. Site administrators are also able to review any and all information entered if we deem such action necessary. For your own protection as well as ours, please avoid posting any personally identifiable information (postal mailing addresses or phone numbers, etc.) in your user profile.
2 - USER OBLIGATIONS
In using our site, you agree to be civil and respectful when commenting on submissions or with other users. We understand that not everyone can be friends with each other, but offensive or disruptive behavior such as personal attacks or harassment is not tolerated and can potentially warrant an administrative response, depending on the severity of it.
Harassment:
At its broadest, personal attacks and harassment include potentially any commentary (including blogs, journal entries, or profile page text, or any comments posted on userpages, submissions, or forum topics) intended to insult, attack or degrade another user, regardless of the manner it is delivered. Because this is obviously a generic definition, for sake of enforcement the following are considered specific examples of harassment and therefore PROHIBITED:
Threats of violence or physical harm (death threats especially).
Use of epithets, derogatory remarks or slurs (e.g., based on race, gender or orientation, age, etc.) to attack or demean another user.
Posting comments or (especially) images that are graphic, vulgar, or otherwise exceedingly offensive, as a means to intimidate or attack another user.
False or misleading accusations of misbehavior or policy violations, particularly copyright infringement or tracing. Serious accusations require serious proof, please bring any and all such reports to the attention of a site staff member so we can investigate.
Threats of administrative action (such as suspensions or bans). Only site administrators are authorized to issue warnings of this nature, regular users are not. If administrative action is truly warranted then please contact a site staff member and we will decide how to take it from there.
Attempting to impersonate another user, especially a member of site administration.
Linking to other pages or images that are intended to harass or attack another user, in lieu of attacking the user directly.
Soliciting, aiding or abetting harassment of another user.
This also includes disclosing personal information about a user as a means to target them for attacks or harassment.
Prohibited Behavior
The following behavior, while not specifically or necessarily a form of harassment is also prohibited:
Any commentary that contains overly explicit material, including sexually explicit imagery or language, excessive use of profanity, or so on.
If you need to report an offensive comment to the attention of site staff, do not be afraid to remove the comment from view; comments are never truly 'deleted' or purged from our systems and will remain readily accessible to site administration. You do not need to supply a screenshot of the offensive comment with your report as evidence; the URL of the page in question is enough, and site staff can investigate it from there.
Soliciting or participating in activity that is clearly illegal or otherwise violative of local governmental laws (ours or yours).
Reciprocal attacks made in response to an initial personal attack or harassment.
Please Do Not Feed The Trolls, It Only Encourages Them.
If you receive a personal attack from another user, do not answer back with a personal attack of your own; in fact, try to avoid answering it altogether. You can simply remove the offending comment from view, block the offender from your userpage, or report them to site staff so we are aware of the situation. (Remember, site staff have ready access to removed comments, it is not necessary to take screenshots or otherwise retain the offensive comment as evidence.)
So-called 'Internet trolls' are users who post inflammatory or disruptive comments with the specific purpose of offending and provoking a reaction (any reaction) from their targets. Do not attempt to \"fight fire with fire\", you cannot beat a troll at their own game and giving them any attention whatsoever merely encourages them to keep it up.
Many trolls are, in fact, repeat offenders with previous bans, and as such their accounts can and will be terminated without warning.
Spamming or Flooding. This includes posting the same (exactly or nearly identical) comments to a large number of userpages, or to the same page repeatedly, or any single comment containing an excessively large volume of (often repeated) text and/or images.
Participating in (i.e. posting or re-posting) chain-letter memes. This is considered a type of Spamming.
Discouraged Behavior
Finally, the following behavior is not or cannot be strictly prohibited, but for various reasons is generally discouraged:
Any accusations of policy violations, such as copyright infringement, tracing, or other violations of our Submission Policy. Please bring any and all such reports to the attention of site staff; notifying the submitter directly has the potential to escalate into Harassment or Personal attacks -- it just does more harm than good.
Complaints about site staff or administration, if they are delivered in an inflammatory, accusatory, or otherwise hostile manner. We have no desire to moderate, 'censor', or otherwise intrude upon everyday discussions, even complaints about us, but site administration are not obligated to and furthermore will not address complaints if they are delivered in a hostile manner. Please remain calm and present any complaints about us in a civil tone.
Attempts to personally attack, degrade, or otherwise harshly complain or criticize a user's work, especially when they have not specifically requested critical feedback in the first place. Users posting such commentary may frequently defend it with such terms as \"constructive criticism\" or a \"critique\" -- however, a proper critique is recognized by its objectivity and neutral point-of-view, focus on the work itself (as opposed to the artist who created it), and civil manner of discourse. Commentary that does not embody these qualities -- or worse, which indulges in personal attacks or harassment -- is not and can never be labelled as 'constructive criticism' or a 'critique'.
Roleplaying outside of our designated roleplay area. Our commenting system is not designed to handle roleplay sessions (whether one-on-one or in groups) and should not be used as such, please gather in the roleplay section instead.
3 - USER GALLERY SUBMISSIONS
Please refer to our separate Submission Policy for details of what materials may and may not be submitted to your Fanart Central user gallery.
4 - MATURE CONTENT
Our site contains material that some users may find offensive. We have a content labelling and filtering system in place to identify such content in user galleries, and you can adjust its settings to include or exclude certain levels of submitted content. Additionally, we do not accept submissions that are considered sexually explicit. If you encounter user gallery submissions that are not appropriately labelled for offensive content, or which may be sexually explicit, please report it to a staff member so we can take appropriate action.
A full description of our labelling system is provided in our separate Ratings Policy page.
5 - ACCOUNT CLOSURE AND TERMINATION
Since participation on our site is inherently voluntary, should you later wish to leave our site (for any reason whatsoever) you may do so at any time. This can be as simple as simply leaving a note in your user profile space about the departure and then logging out (with no intentions of logging back in again), or you may file a request with site administrators for an account closure. We also provide a tool, available with your profile page settings, should you desire to close your user account.
Please note that for various technical reasons your account will not actually be purged or \"deleted\" from our system; requesting an account closure is simply shorthand for voluntarily removing all submitted content from your gallery and de-activating your account.
We also reserve the right to temporarily suspend or outright terminate (\"ban\") the account of any user found violating site policies. Because banning is obviously a severe action, we keep it for use as a last resort only when all other warnings and/or corrective measures against a user have failed. Circumstances surrounding their behavior are investigated and taken into account as well; minor offenses or isolated incidents rarely ever warrant a suspension or termination, and generally speaking, we do not terminate accounts on first offenses unless the account is reasonably believed to have been created in evasion of a previous suspension or ban.