Acceptable Use

1What this document covers

This covers appsithink.com and the two email addresses published on it. It does not cover conduct inside inaff or commentrs, which each have their own rules written for a product with users in it.

There is no user generated content on this site. Nothing can be posted, uploaded or commented here, so there are no posting rules. What there is, is two addresses that reach a person, and this document is about those.

2Every address on this site is read by a person

There is no assistant in front of them and no automated triage behind them. That is the point of them, and it is also the constraint.

Attention spent on mail sent in bad faith is attention not spent on somebody with a real legal problem or a real commercial one. That is the entire reason this document exists, and it is the standard against which everything below should be read.

3What we ask

Do not send prank mail.

Do not send automated, bulk or repeated mail, including mailing list additions and mass outreach.

Do not send threats, whether to a person, to the company or to the products.

Do not send malware, or links whose purpose is to compromise a recipient.

Do not impersonate somebody else, and do not forge a sending address.

Do not send a question you already have the answer to in order to occupy somebody's afternoon.

Do not send a product support request to these addresses. It does not get handled here, it gets routed, and that costs you a day. Support for inaff and commentrs is a ticket inside each product, works without an account, and gives you a number and a state you can check.

4What happens if you do it anyway

Misusing either address is treated as misuse of a contact channel, in the same way as misusing a report button or any other part of a product.

It is handled by the published process of whichever product you hold an account on, rather than by a separate process invented for email, and you are told which rule was applied.

For this category the response is graduated. A warning comes first, where a warning is likely to be enough. Losing access to our apps is where repeated or deliberate misuse ends up, not where it starts.

The rule bites on bad faith. Being wrong, being repetitive or being annoying is not bad faith, and section 6 says so in terms.

If you do not hold an account with either product, the only thing available to us is to stop replying and, where the volume requires it, to filter the sender. There is no other sanction, because there is nothing else to take away.

5Appeals

Every enforcement decision we make can be appealed, and every appeal is read by a person rather than a filter.

The mechanics of an appeal, including any cost, any effect on your account standing and the deadlines, are set out in the terms of whichever product the decision was made on, because that is where the decision was made and that is the document that governs it. This one does not restate them, so that there is never a version of those rules on a company page that has drifted from the version a user is actually held to.

One thing is worth saying here because it is a property of the route rather than of the rules: on inaff an appeal works on a banned device and needs neither an account nor your real name, because the codes that open it are created on the device at the moment of the ban and before any network call.

If we got it wrong we will say so and reverse it. If we did not, we will still tell you which rule it was.

Consider this document the notice. It is published in advance so that nobody has to find the rule out by breaking it, and we will not send a second general warning. Any individual action still arrives with its reason attached, because a sanction without a reason is not something we are willing to issue.

6What is never treated as misuse

Being wrong. Being angry with us. Asking something we have answered before, or asking again because the first answer did not make sense. Disagreeing with the outcome. Bringing a complaint we would rather not receive. Writing in a language we have to translate. Writing at length.

And never, in any circumstances: a request to see, correct, export or delete your data; a report about somebody's safety; a report of a security vulnerability; a legal notice; a copyright notice or counter notice; or anything else the law entitles you to send us.

Those are answered on their merits regardless of what we think of the sender, and no restriction we apply anywhere else removes your right to send them.

If you are ever unsure whether something you want to send falls foul of this document, send it. This document exists to stop a small number of people wasting a person's day, not to make you hesitate before asking a real question.

7Reporting a security problem

If you have found a security vulnerability in this site or in either product, write to support@appsithink.com and say so in the subject line.

Report it to us before you report it anywhere else, give us a reasonable period to fix it, and do not access, modify or delete data that is not yours while demonstrating it. Do not run denial of service tests, do not run automated scanners against production, and do not social engineer our people.

We will not pursue a researcher who follows those conditions in good faith, and we will credit you if you want to be credited. We do not currently run a paid bounty programme and we would rather say that plainly than imply one exists.

8Using the site itself

Do not attempt to gain unauthorised access to the site or the systems behind it.

Do not scrape the site in a way that degrades it for other readers. Ordinary crawling within robots.txt is fine, and so is an archiving service.

Do not frame the site or present it in a way that misleads about who published it. The site sends headers that forbid framing, which is both the technical and the stated position.

Do not use the site, the name Apps I Think, or the products' names to imply an endorsement or relationship that does not exist.

9Changes and contact

If this document changes, the version number and effective date at the top change with it.

Questions about this document: support@appsithink.com.

Commercial and press: partnerships@appsithink.com.