How many times have you actually read the terms and conditions?

We sign up to new sites and services daily and they all have the famously long t&c’s that we all pretend to have read, tick the checkbox and press continue…

But if no one reads them. Why even bother?

Terms and Conditions is the legal basis of which you are willing to do business with your customer. It sets the rules for your site and underlines that information is collected about the user… essentially covering your A** if it all goes wrong.

Most T&C’s are longwinded, hard to understand and boring with the actual intention to discourage people from reading them. For the drinking game project, I don’t want to discourage users from reading about us and the policies at which our service relies on. I want to be open about who we are, what we want from our users and the reasons why.

One example of a company who have famously adapted the terms and conditions is Tumblr. They explain everything using Jargon and law terms with a little explanation underneath summarising the section in a sarcastic and humous way which actually appeals to the user.

For the community that i am building, I plan to have clear terms and conditions similar to Tumblr’s where people will actually read and understand what information is being collected and how it will benefit not only us, but them too. It will also encourage only those into following the rules of the forum to sign up and hopefully prevent trolling on our platform.

Escalation Plans are put in place by site owners and admins as a way of controlling the content on the site and ensuring it follows the community guidelines.

Many companies such as YouTube follow the popular 3 strike policy. This has been adapted by many organisations as an effective way to warm users without being too harsh.

The escalation plan is as follows: A User has three warnings, if they break any community guidelines (Spam, Trolling, Abuse, Promotion), content ID Claims (Claiming to be someone else, or posting others content) or Copyright infringement (Uploading others work, using copyrighted audio). — The user will be warned via email, if this continues twice more the user is banned and unable to sign up to the site again under a different account.

For the community I aim to build, I feel that this escalation plan is affective and fair but also follows conventions set by some of the most popular websites in the world with some of the largest online communities, therefore users are more than likely to already have a YouTube account and used to this escalation plan.

Tom.