TOS in Discourse

The Neos Project Tools & Operations
1

Funny story, did you know that the Discourse TOS say that all legal disagreements are to be governed by the laws of California, and that three Arbitrators in California are supposed to be appointed in such a dispute?

Do we have any (legal) connections to California (or anywhere else)? :wink:

See: https://discuss.neos.io/tos#15

2

We have secret plan to have a nice office in a garage out there, just for the lawyers :wink:

3

Well, that’s Wordpress / Automattic of course …

But speaking of TOS – who’d volunteer to find out if

  1. we need some terms of service and
  2. if so, adapts them so they make sense for our project?
4

I’ve read the TOS. :slight_smile: I’m one of those odd individuals that actually reads TOS on the web… This one seems to be pretty standard stuff. “California” was the only surprising part of it.

Here are my notes on what we might want to address in the TOS:
http://scrible.com/s/ke22k

  • “Neos Project” - a legal entity? (an ongoing question :wink:)
  • The california thing
  • The User Content License: CC-BY-NC-SA

For the user content license, I’ll start a new topic.

5

https://meta.discourse.org/t/legality-of-discourse-tos/24113/6?u=cognifloyd

General advice online says that we should have a TOS to:

  • be “covered” (like insurance)
  • say what is/isn’t allowed/acceptable
  • everybody has it
  • Yoda said “Good idea it is”

OK, so I made the Yoda reason up. I doubt we’ll ever go to trial, so we’d probably be okay without it. Then again, maybe having a TOS sends a signal to potential community members: “Hey, they’re legit with a TOS and everything!” Maybe it would make us look more ‘professional’ to have one?

6

So, if we don’t really, really need them, it would be good to not have them. We should keep it simple where we can.

7

OK. Is there a way to just hide the TOS in discourse then? We can always put it back if we have a reason to do so later.

Edit: It turns out, that we cannot delete the post, and probably can’t hide it either. For reasoning see:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/not-possible-to-delete-specific-default-topics/21620

However, we could just delete the contents of that page/post and perhaps replace it with something that says:

Follow the community guidelines, and user-provided content is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA.

That might be the bare minimum we need.

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