Terms & Conditions

By Township News Network

Posted on 05.15.07

By signing up for the Township News Network, you are agreeing that you have read and understand the terms and conditions explained in this document.

Terminology

In this document certain words or phrases are used with specific meanings.

Terms — This phrase may be used to refer to the current document entitled Terms & Conditions or Terms and Conditions.
Township — A township is a legal government entity in the United States of America governed by a board of trustees or a township administrator. In the future this site may extend to government entities that are not officially designated as townships but are equivalent in nature. At the moment, only official government entities referred to as legal townships in the United States of America may join this site as a "Township". In these Terms, "Townships" and "Township Members" refer to accounts on this site representing an official township. Township accounts on this site must be administered by an actual township. Townships use this site for an annual fee.

Service Agreement

The Township News Network provides online content management services to augment or supplant a township's website. The Township News Network provides an initial 30-day free trial, after which an annual fee of $350 is due for all township memberships.

Liability

You understand that there is no guarantee of uptime. You will not hold liable the Township News Network, its principal owners, employees or affiliates liable for any damages resulting from a failure of service, network failure, server failure, information loss or any other related failure of service. You understand that we regularly backup all data on the site, but that there is no guarantee that information will never be lost.

We offer no guarantee as to the workings of this site. You agree to use the site as is, and will never hold us liable for any damages that may result from its use, including but not limited to, loss of data. We do not verify the information posted by the members of this site.

Accuracy of Information

You agree to provide complete and accurate information on this site. The information you supply, such as your name, address and email address must be accurate. You must use a current email address so that we may contact you with important account information such as password retrieval and to receive our newsletter.

You may only join as a township if and only if your township has formally agreed to use this site via a vote of its board of trustees and you are the one they have legally agreed to represent their township on this site.

You also agree that the information contained in articles, calendar events and media cut lines you submit are accurate to the best of your knowledge. You agree not to use this site for malicious purposes, nor partake in any activity that is illegal. You agree to respect all applicable local, state and federal laws as well as the terms and conditions of this site.

Privacy Policy

We will not sell or share your contact information with any third party except as required by law. The information you provide is kept for internal use. Townships using the newsletter system do not have access to the emails in their newsletter list.

Membership Policies

Each township member that joins our site must create an official document regarding the standards, methods and requirements for using the site. Such a document (referred to here as the Rules) must be posted as an article in the "Rules And Regulations" topic on the site so that all visitors can see the townships' regulations regarding use of the site. Such a document must expound the rules by which townships submit their information to the site and who has access to posting information on the site. The document must expound in clear language the process by which the township will update its Rules document.

Townships are required to create a Rules document and call it "Rules for Using the Township News Network". The title of the document may be appended with the name of the township or vary in any way that does not delete from the required title. This document must be voted on in a legal and public forum and must be ratified by a majority of the trustees or governing members of a township.

Townships are bound by the terms and conditions of this site AND their own official "Rules for Using the Township News Network". Rules created by townships may not infringe on the general terms and conditions of this site. The Rules document must be published on the site no later than sixty (60) days of joining the site.

Content

Townships and businesses are free to post articles and profiles as they wish. All must, however, strictly abide by a few rules.

No pornography
No bestiality
No libel
No content that incites hate
No spam
No plagiarism
No SEO Blogging Content

This site and its administrators believe in free speech. However, we see this site as a professional billboard for the express intent of disseminating township-related news or community information. Use it responsibly. Articles and events that include profanity, violence and/or sexuality may be labeled as containing such content so that parental controls will limit viewing such pages. Dubious content can and will be deleted without notice. Articles that contain malicious content may be deleted from the server by the site administrators.

You may only post your own original information for which you are legally permitted to post. Your township may post its news, events and other township-related information, but may not post information that is the property of other entities, individuals, etc without first obtaining legal permission to use such content.

You may only post information that is appropriate for public display. You may not post articles relating trade secrets, trademark secrets, classified information or any legally privileged information. We reserve the immediately terminate any account that does not abide by these rules.

Spam

You will not use this site for spamming. You may not contact other members for the purpose of selling goods and/or services. You may not post articles that sell or promote third-party products. Do not post anything like spam in guestbooks or emails.

Because our primary method of communication is email, you agree to place the following email addresses into your email safe list or ISP white list of allowed email addresses: news@townshipnews.net, members@townshipnews.net, newsletter@townshipnews.net and troubleshooting@townshipnews.net . You may not block emails from these email addresses.

Members and visitors may optionally agree to receive our monthly newsletter, containing news about the site, upgrades, feature enhancements and links to featured articles and other members. Our newsletter may sometimes contain third-party promotional material. By signing up for our newsletter, you agree to accept our newsletter as legitimate email, and to never tag it as spam with your ISP, web host or local mail client. (While our newsletter may contain third-party promotional material, we will never share your email address with any third party except as may be required by law.) You can opt-out of the newsletter at any time.

As a member of the site, you will also receive regular account updates containing information on optimizing your account on the site, information on site upgrades, and links to new features. Account updates do not follow regular schedules and contain no more than two promotional link. You may not opt-out of your account updates, as it is a direct means of our organization contacting you about the state of the site and its development. You will only stop receiving account updates if you remove your account from the site. On average, you will receive 0-4 account updates per month, depending on the amount of feature development our team can do in a month.

Township accounts may use our site to send out automatically generated newsletters. Township accounts are limited to sending four (4) newsletters in any 30-day period. The content of any newsletter is subject to the same restrictions that all other site content are subject to. For the intents and purposes of this site, newsletters are a special set of articles. Townships may not have access to the actual emails addresses in their newsletter list and may not ask for their recipients to supply their email accounts to the township directly through the newsletter (i.e., by asking subscribers to send an email to the township for the express purpose of collecting the subscribers' email addresses). Townships may, however, collect email addresses manually with written sign-ups at meetings and official places of businesses and later manually enter them into the township's newsletter subscription system. Townships collecting subscribers in this method must inform anyone subscribing by this method that they are collecting email addresses manually and that their email addresses are in the hands of the township.

Hacking

You will not attempt to hack into the server or access pages not intended for your use. You will not attempt to log in as another user. You will not attempt to load any file that is malicious or viral. You will only load file formats that our site accepts (JPG, GIF, PDF and MP3).

Copyright

Authors retain the copyright of all work they load to our site. We do reserve the right to use any media loaded onto our server for promotional materials. Under no circumstance may anyone use the work on this site without first obtaining 1) written consent from the administrators of this site or 2) written consent from the individual author of the work in question.

Linking

Members of this site may include links in profiles and articles to any web page provided that the links do not infringe on our content restrictions listed above and the sites relate to the topic/information presented in the particular profile/article.

We do not require our members to provide links back to us in their sites; however, we strongly encourage such links, as they further enhance the traffic to our site and increase the viability of this community.

Payment & Billing

Townships agree to pay for their service in a timely manner. Membership fees are considered past-due after 30 days of an invoice, which is initially 30 days after sign-up. Unless otherwise noted in written agreement by the Township News Network, any township that remains on the site past its trial period agrees to pay for at least one (1) year or membership. Members may pay for more than one year at their discretion. The current billing address is: 3468 Stalling Court, Columbus, Ohio 43204. Until these terms are updated, all checks should be made payable to Shawn Olson or Master Web Designers. Online payment systems may also become available.