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Disclaimer: We are not running a lawyers office, so this is also no legal advise in any shape or form. 🙂 We just want you to know what other communities are using for their own terms & conditions page. You should always consult your legal department to make sure that you are on the safe side!

While building a new community, you will also have to create a terms & conditions page. This might be a new challenge for you, as you never had to deal with these things before...

In this topic we have collected some tips which hopefully will help you to define and optimize your terms & conditions page, so that you're not just waterproof for the future, but also that users can easily understand what they are allowed to do and what not.

How to change the Terms & Conditions

  1. Go to Control → customization → phrases.
  2. Look up the phrase 'terms' (Module: Forum, key: Terms)
  3. Make your changes to the T&C (HTML & CSS styling is allowed)
  4. Press save changes
  5. View your Terms & Conditions by adding /site/terms to the end of your homepage url

 

General things things to include


Here you can find a list of items which we usually see included in the terms & conditions page of an inSided community:

1. General Guidelines / Code of conduct
You want your users to understand clearly which behaviour is allowed on the community, and which not. Things that surely need to be included are:

  • No abusive behaviour against other users (e.g. insults / threats / racism / harrasment)
  • No off-topic discussion / intentional derailing of discussions
  • No multiple registrations
  • No commercial advertisement
  • No sharing of illegal content
  • No Spam / solliciting
  • No public discussion of community staff action / communication

You will find these points written out in many of the examples shown in the list at the end of this topic.

2. Liability for shared information
Make sure that users understand that information taken from your community does not necessarily have to be correct, and that they have to use this information carefully. No damages resulting from information taken from your community can be held against your company.

3. Removing content / banning users
The community team has the right to remove content from the community, should it feel that this is necessary. Same goes for restricting access to the community (banning users). Include the email address of your community team here, so that users can email you if they are disagreeing with an action of the community team.

Tip: You can mention here that you usually will only do these things to protect the positive experience of other users on the community.

4. Links to third party websites:
This item has developed into a standard thing you have to do nowadays, to make clear that you are not responsible for any material on other websites to which you or other users on your community are linking to.

5. A Cookie Policy:
If you are using the default setup for cookies used by inSided, then you can use the default text which we place on your terms & conditions page. You can find a copy of this in the spoiler below:

What are cookies
A cookie is a small piece of information that is stored on your computer as a file. Cookies enable us to recognize your computer on a subsequent visit. Cookies do not store personal information. We need your permission to use cookies.

How we use cookies
Information we obtain from cookies are used to analyze our community. We use this data to adjust the community to your personal preferences. Finally, when sending information about our products and services, we can take your previous interest for certain pages into account.

Cookie setting
You choose which cookies you want to allow. If you have an account you can adjust your choice in your profile settings. If you do not have an account, you can change your cookie settings by deleting them via the internet options of your browser and visiting the community again. You will then be asked to choose your settings again. There are 3 settings: Basic, Normal and Complete.

  • Basic: Functional
  • Normal: Functional + analytics
  • Complete: Functional + analytics + social media + embedded videos

Refuse cookies
Don't you want to use cookies at all? Visit the help pages of your browser to turn off or reject cookies. Be aware, it is possible that not everything works or is displayed correctly when refusing cookies.


6. Availability of the community
A smaller number of communities decide to include this item to explain that they cannot guarantee availability, but it can also be used to forbid people attempts to break the community and it's functionality, or simply to inform that they cannot be held responsible for costs using the platform (e.g. from your internet provider).

 

Tone of voice


Of course you should be as clear as possible in your choice of words, but also try to speak the language of your users. A long, confusing terms & conditions page will not just confuse your users (causing them to break the rules unintentionally), it will also make it harder for you in explaining users which rule they have broken. Check some of the examples to see how to structure your terms & conditions more clearly.

 

Some examples


Below you can find a number of good examples for a terms & conditions page, hopefully you will find them inspiring!

Sonos Terms & Conditions
iD Mobile Terms & Conditions
OVO energy Terms & Conditions
Deezer Terms & Conditions

Do you have some questions, or are you missing something? Share it with us in the comments!

Hi team,

Where are these terms actually surfaced in the community? Are there any elements that link to this page?

Hi, I want to echo @Onomatopoeia’s question above.  We have the same question.  Where/how can we surface the Terms more persistently in the community so members can view them later or our community moderators can refer to them?

Also, when we make updates to the text of the Terms & Conditions, are all members auto-prompted to view them again and acknowledge/accept?  

cc @mstruening @dandre @Dorothyt 

Hi @Onomatopoeia & @JKelley ,

These terms are displayed upon user registration. The link is present here and all users must agree via the checkbox in order to submit the form and create their account. You can also add a persistent link to your header or footer using Customize mode in the front end or Customization in the control environment - let me know if you need any help with this.

To your second question @JKelley, users are not currently auto prompted to view and accept terms again when the Terms & Conditions are updated. I will raise this with our Product team now.

 

This is great, thanks for the quick reply @olimarrio!  And yes, it would be great if in future there was a way to either auto-prompt members to acknowledge revised terms upon login, or perhaps a way to schedule that on an annual basis or something. 

Hi! If our members want to view the T&C upon registration, they are rerouted to the login page. This is because they are not logged in yet to view the T&C, because they don’t have an account yet. Is there a way to link to the T&C without having to be logged in?

 

@annemijn.hintzen What you can do is link to a PDF of your terms, you can style it as you want so the experience is still good.

@olimarrio @Alistair FIeld 

We have a weird solution to the T&C right now and I'm trying to fix this.

I want to add the phrase because we currently do not have it. But when I try to add the phrase it gives me an error. Can you help me out? In the sandbox I have no issues with this.

 

Current
Error when trying to add phrase

 

Hi! If our members want to view the T&C upon registration, they are rerouted to the login page. This is because they are not logged in yet to view the T&C, because they don’t have an account yet. Is there a way to link to the T&C without having to be logged in?

 

Yes, it’s not possible for new, unregistered users to view the T&Cs anymore. A new user in my community has discovered this gap during registration two weeks ago.

I contacted Gainsight support (not sure If I’m allowed to post here what they wrote exactly, maybe I need to read the Gainsight T&Cs again 🙂): it’s possible to update the Phrase for a hyperlink to an external page with T&Cs.

But unfortunately, due to some reasons, we cannot use an external page at the moment. 
So, I experimented a bit today and added the T&Cs as a looong phrase below the registration form. It’s not beautiful, but at least the T&Cs are there so users know what they are actually accepting during registration.

@Karenottema, can you please explain this and how to do this exactly? 
Thanks!

BTW: when I open the Gainsight Terms & Conditions, a cookie info opens…
So, the correct T&Cs are here?

 

Hi @Eva!

You can redirect the Terms page to an external one with a redirect script:
 

<script>

if (window.location.href == 'old URL') {

 window.location = "new URL"

}

</script>


Let me know if this doesn’t work for you. Also, feel free to submit another support ticket about this

Hi @leo-inspired 

Thanks. Yes, I can change the link with the script (tested in staging community).

But the problem still remains:
The redirection script works only within the community so terms are still only accessible if a user is already registered. According to support: it's not possible to make the terms link public anymore.

But a user needs to have the ability to see/read/access the terms first before accepting them, from a legal point of view.

Currently, if a user is not registered yet, the Terms & Conditions link does not open any terms but redirects to the login page, as @annemijn.hintzen wrote (btw: annemijn, how have you solved this?)

 

Maybe I’m overlooking something? 🤔 

@Eva we followed Karen’s advice, and now we link to a pdf hosted on a HubSpot page. Good luck!

Hi @Eva, 

I made a mistake when explaining this to you. The redirect script will not work for private communities.

What you’ll need to do instead is edit/add the Phrase below and have the href HTML tag redirecting to your external website:

Module: Common
Key: loginBox.terms


This should do the job, however please let me know if you have any problems with this!

Hi @leo-inspired 

It works.
Not with the phrase you mentioned, but with this one: terms / Forum Terms

(I added the target="_blank" attribute to open the external page (google in my example) in a new tab, but this doesn’t work. Maybe it’s not supported)

So, I’m able to link to an external website now 👍 
Also, the link to the Terms and Conditions has disappeared from the login page.
Which is good, so unregistered users are not tempted to click on it 👍
 

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