I have read and agreed to the terms and conditions…..

Participatory Cultures Term 2 Blog 3

Research terms & conditions and escalation plans that would make relevant models for your community and report back on your findings.

Having a comprehensive and consistent terms of service document for an online community is very important. It protects the service from coming under fire if there is any illegal or discriminative language or activity happening on the site, and it also protects the user from copyright infringement and identity theft, if done right.

In order to create a comprehensive terms and conditions document for our online community, eventBuzz, I decided to do some research into other, similar services and see how they had written theirs, and if there was anything I could use in ours. To start off with I looked at the Tumblr terms of service, I liked how the people at Tumblr had taken the time to explain in layman’s terms at the end of each section, what they actually meant, it made it a lot easier to understand the document and the rules of using the blogging platform.

I then looked at the terms of service for meetup.com, a forum very similar to the one my team and I are creating. The users can find groups and communities that meet up (get it?) in their local area that they can join and contribute to. The terms of service were very laborious and long-winded, which gave me the impression that they weren’t read all that often. This isn’t what I wanted for our service’s terms and conditions. I wanted our users to not feel intimidated by the content so that they would actually read it and know what is expected of them when they join the service.

I then looked at Facebook’s terms and conditions. Again, Facebook’s terms were quite long-winded, but they were also very comprehensive and simple to understand. It clearly lists what sort of behaviour is allowed and what isn’t, which is something I wanted to include in eventBuzz’s terms of service.

Finally I looked at createaforum.com’s terms of service. I felt that these terms were succinct enough to fit eventBuzz’s needs and were similar enough to what we wanted to include, that there wasn’t a great deal to change. I used these terms to create the eventBuzz terms of service, which can be found here. I also added in the layman’s paragraphs element, like Tumblr.