SITE & FORUM TERMS & CONDITIONS OF USE

Welcome to our website. If you continue to browse and use thesistahood.co.uk websites* you are agreeing to comply with and be bound by the following terms and conditions of use, which together with our privacy policy govern TheSistahood's relationship with you in relation to this website.  These Terms and Conditions apply whether or not you register as a member on our forums ("Member").

The term "The Sistahood" or "us" or "we" refers to the owner/s of the website. The term "you" refers to the Member or viewer of our website.

This Agreement sets out the legally binding terms of your use of the Site and your membership in and may be modified by us from time to time, such modifications to be effective upon posting by us on the Site. This Agreement includes our Acceptable Use Policy for Content Posted in the forums, Privacy Policy, and any notices regarding the Site.

Eligibility

You must be sixteen or over to register as a member of TheSistahood forums. By using the Site, you represent and warrant that you have the right, authority, and capacity to enter into this Agreement and to abide by all of the terms and conditions of this Agreement.

Term

This Agreement will remain in full force and effect while you use the Site and/or are a Member. You may terminate your membership at any time, for any reason by contacting admin@sistas.co.uk. It may take anything up to 7 days to remove your account from our records. TheSistahood may terminate your membership for any reason, effective upon sending notice to you at the email address you provide in your application for membership, or such other email address as you may later provide to us.

Non-Commercial Use

The Site may not be used in connection with any commercial endeavours. Organisations, companies, and/or businesses may not become Members and should not use the Service or the Site for any purpose. Illegal and/or unauthorised uses of the Site, including collecting usernames and/or email addresses of members by electronic or other means for the purpose of sending unsolicited email and unauthorised framing of or linking to the Site will be investigated, and appropriate legal action will be taken, including without limitation, civil, criminal, and injunctive redress.

Content Posted on the Site
a. You understand and agree that TheSistahood may review and delete any content, messages, photos or profiles (collectively, "Content") that in the sole judgment of TheSistahood violates this Agreement or which might be offensive, illegal, or that might violate the rights, harm, or threaten the safety of Members.

b. You are solely responsible for the Content that you publish or display (hereinafter, "post") on the Service, or transmit to other Members.

c. By posting Content to any public area of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to TheSistahood an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, fully paid, worldwide license to use, copy, perform, display, and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorise sublicenses of the foregoing.

d. The following is a partial list of the kind of Content that is illegal or prohibited on the Site. TheSistahood reserves the right to investigate and take appropriate legal action in its sole discretion against anyone who violates this provision, including without limitation, removing the offending communication from the Service and terminating the membership of such violators. It includes but is not limited to Content that:

• is patently offensive to the online community, such as Content that promotes racism, bigotry, hatred or physical harm of any kind against any group or individual;

• harasses or advocates harassment of another person;

• involves the transmission of "junk mail", "chain letters," or unsolicited mass mailing or "spamming";

• promotes information that you know is false, misleading or promotes illegal activities or conduct that is abusive, threatening, obscene, defamatory or libelous;

• promotes an illegal or unauthorised copy of another person’s copyrighted work, such as providing pirated computer programs, images or links to them, providing information to circumvent manufacture-installed copy-protect devices, or providing pirated music or links to pirated music files;

• contains restricted or password only access pages, or hidden pages or images (those not linked to or from another accessible page);

• provides material that exploits people under the age of 18 in a sexual or violent manner, or solicits personal information from anyone under 18; TheSistahood reserves the right to provide all information including email addresses, IP address, telephone numbers and any other personal information held on members violating these provisions to appropriate investigating authorities subject to the provisions of the Data Protection Act of the United Kingdom 1998;

• provides instructional information about illegal activities such as making or buying illegal weapons, violating someone’s privacy, or providing or creating computer viruses;

• solicits passwords or personal identifying information for commercial or unlawful purposes from other users; and

• engages in commercial activities and/or sales without our prior consent such as contests, sweepstakes, barter, advertising, and pyramid schemes.

e. You must use the Service in a manner consistent with any and all applicable laws and regulations.

f. You may not engage in advertising to, or solicitation of, other Members to buy or sell any products or services through the Service. You may not transmit any chain letters or junk email to other Members. Although TheSistahood cannot monitor the conduct of its Members off the Site, it is also a violation of these rules to use any information obtained from the Service in order to harass, abuse, or harm another person, or in order to contact, advertise to, solicit, or sell to any Member without their prior explicit consent. In order to protect our Members from such advertising or solicitation, TheSistahood reserves the right to restrict the number of emails which a Member may send to other Members to a number which TheSistahood deems appropriate in its sole discretion.

Copyright Policy

You may not post, distribute, or reproduce in any way any copyrighted material, trademarks, or other proprietary information without obtaining the prior written consent of the owner of such proprietary rights. Without limiting the foregoing, if you believe that your work has been copied and posted on the Service in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, please provide us with the following information: an electronic or physical signature of the person authorised to act on behalf of the owner of the copyright interest; a description of the copyrighted work that you claim has been infringed; a description of where the material that you claim is infringing is located on the Site; your address, telephone number, and email address; a written statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorised to act on the copyright owner's behalf.

Privacy

Use of the Site and/or the Service is also governed by our Privacy Policy.

Disclaimers
Neither we nor any third parties provide any warranty or guarantee as to the accuracy, timeliness, performance, completeness or suitability of the information and materials found or offered on this website for any particular purpose, whether caused by users of the Site, Members or by any of the equipment or programming associated with or utilised in the Service.  You acknowledge that such information and materials may contain inaccuracies or errors and we expressly exclude liability for any such inaccuracies or errors to the fullest extent permitted by law.

TheSistahood is not responsible for the conduct, whether online or offline, of any user of the Site or Member of the Service.

TheSistahood assumes no responsibility for any error, omission, interruption, deletion, defect, delay in operation or transmission, communications line failure, theft or destruction or unauthorised access to, or alteration of, user or Member communications.

TheSistahood is not responsible for any problems or technical malfunction of any telephone network or lines, computer online systems, servers or providers, computer equipment, software, failure of email or players on account of technical problems or traffic congestion on the Internet or at any Website or combination thereof, including injury or damage to users and/or Members or to any other person's computer related to or resulting from participating or downloading materials in connection with the Web and/or in connection with the Service.

Under no circumstances will TheSistahood be responsible for any loss or damage, including personal injury or death, resulting from anyone's use of the Site or the Service, any Content posted on the Site or transmitted to Members, or any interactions between users of the Site, whether online or offline.

Your use of any information or materials on this website is entirely at your own risk, for which we shall not be liable. It shall be your own responsibility to ensure that any products, services or information available through this website meet your specific requirements.

From time to time this website may also include links to other websites. These links are provided for your convenience to provide further information. They do not necessarily signify that we endorse the website(s). We have no responsibility for the content of linked website(s).

Limitation on Liability

Except in jurisdictions where such provisions are restricted, in no event will TheSistahood be liable to you or any third person for any indirect, consequential, exemplary, incidental, special or punitive damages, including also lost profits arising from your use of the Site or the Service, even if TheSistahood has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Disputes

If there is any dispute about or involving the Site and/or the Service, by using the Site, you agree that the dispute will be governed by the laws of the United Kingdom.

Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold TheSistahood, its subsidiaries, affiliates, officers, agents, and other partners, harmless from any loss, liability, claim, or demand, including reasonable solicitor's fees, made by any third party due to or arising out of your use of the Service in violation of this Agreement and/or arising from a breach of this Agreement and/or any breach of your representations and warranties set forth above.

Member Disputes

You are solely responsible for your interactions with other TheSistahood Members. TheSistahood reserves the right, but has no obligation, to monitor disputes between you and other Members.

Other

You may not create a link to this website from another website or document without our prior written consent.

This Agreement, accepted upon use of the Site and further affirmed by becoming a Member of our forums, contains the entire agreement between you and TheSistahood regarding the use of the Site and/or the Service. If any provision of this Agreement is held invalid, the remainder of this Agreement shall continue in full force and effect.

Your use of this website and any dispute arising out of such use of the website is subject to the laws of England and Wales.

*TheSistahood.co.uk websites includes the following: thesistahood.co.uk, sistas.co.uk, brothas.co.uk, thebrothahood.co.uk

A quick reminder of what you agreed to when you registered on our forums:

By accessing “thesistahood.co.uk” forums (hereinafter “we”, “us”, “our”), you agreed to be legally bound by the following terms. If you do not agree to be legally bound by all of the following terms then please do not access and/or use “thesistahood.co.uk”. We may change these at any time and we’ll do our utmost in informing you, though it would be prudent to review this regularly yourself as your continued usage of “thesistahood.co.uk” after changes mean you agree to be legally bound by these terms as they are updated and/or amended.

Our forums are powered by phpBB (hereinafter “they”, “them”, “their”, “phpBB software”, “www.phpbb.com”, “phpBB Group”, “phpBB Teams”) which is a bulletin board solution released under the “General Public License” (hereinafter “GPL”) and can be downloaded from www.phpbb.com. The phpBB software only facilitates Internet based discussions and the GPL strictly forbids them in what we allow and/or disallow as permissible content and/or conduct. For further information about phpBB, please see: http://www.phpbb.com/.

You agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening, sexually-orientated or any other material that may violate any laws be it of your country, the country where “thesistahood.co.uk” is hosted or International Law. Doing so may lead to you being immediately and permanently banned, with notification of your Internet Service Provider if deemed required by us. The IP address of all posts are recorded to aid in enforcing these conditions. You agree that “thesistahood.co.uk” have the right to remove, edit, move or close any topic at any time should we see fit. As a user you agree to any information you have entered to being stored in a database. While this information will not be disclosed to any third party without your consent, neither “thesistahood.co.uk” nor phpBB shall be held responsible for any hacking attempt that may lead to the data being compromised.

PRIVACY POLICY

This privacy policy sets out how we use and protect any information that you give us when you use this website.

TheSistahood is committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. Should we ask you to provide certain information by which you can be identified when using this website, then you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement.

We may change this policy from time to time by updating this page. You should check this page from time to time to ensure that you are happy with any changes. This policy is effective from 1 June 2007.

Forums

This section explains in detail how “thesistahood.co.uk” along with its affiliated companies (hereinafter “we”, “us”, “our”, “thesistahood.co.uk”, “http://thesistahood.co.uk/phpbb-3.0.rc1/phpbb3”) and phpBB (hereinafter “they”, “them”, “their”, “phpBB software”, “www.phpbb.com”, “phpBB Group”, “phpBB Teams”) use any information collected during any session of usage by you (hereinafter “your information”).

Your information is collected via two ways. Firstly, by browsing “thesistahood.co.uk” will cause the phpBB software to create a number of cookies, which are small text files that are downloaded on to your computer’s web browser temporary files. The first two cookies just contain a user identifier (hereinafter “user-id”) and an anonymous session identifier (hereinafter “session-id”), automatically assigned to you by the phpBB software. A third cookie will be created once you have browsed topics within “thesistahood.co.uk” and is used to store which topics have been read, thereby improving your user experience.

We may also create cookies external to the phpBB software whilst browsing “thesistahood.co.uk”, though these are outside the scope of this document which is intended to only cover the pages created by the phpBB software. The second way in which we collect your information is by what you submit to us. This can be, and is not limited to: posting as an anonymous user (hereinafter “anonymous posts”), registering on “thesistahood.co.uk” (hereinafter “your account”) and posts submitted by you after registration and whilst logged in (hereinafter “your posts”).

Your account will at a bare minimum contain a uniquely identifiable name (hereinafter “your user name”), a personal password used for logging into your account (hereinafter “your password”) and a personal, valid e-mail address (hereinafter “your e-mail”). Your information for your account at “thesistahood.co.uk” is protected by data-protection laws applicable in the country that hosts us. Any information beyond your user name, your password and your e-mail required by “thesistahood.co.uk” during the registration process are at our digression what is mandatory and what is optional. In all cases, you have the option of what information in your account is publicly displayed. Furthermore, within your account, you have the option to opt-in or opt-out of automatically generated e-mails from the phpBB software.

Your password is ciphered (a one-way hash) so that it is secure. However, it is recommended that you do not reuse the same password across a number of different websites. Your password is the means of accessing your account at “thesistahood.co.uk”, so please guard it carefully and under no circumstance will anyone affiliated with “thesistahood.co.uk”, phpBB or another 3rd party, legitimately ask you for your password. Should you forget your password for your account, you can use the “I forgot my password” feature provided by the phpBB software. This process will ask you to submit your user name and your e-mail, then the phpBB software will generate a new password to reclaim your account.
 

Links to other sites

Our website may contain links to other websites of interest. However, once you have used these links to leave our site, you should note that we do not have any control over that other website. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information which you provide whilst visiting such sites and such sites are not governed by this privacy statement. You should exercise caution and look at the privacy statement applicable to the website in question.

Controlling your personal information

We will not sell, distribute or lease your personal information to third parties unless we have your permission or are required by law.

You may request details of personal information which we hold about you under the Data Protection Act 1998.

If you believe that any information we are holding on you is incorrect or incomplete, please email us as soon as possible, at admin@sistas.co.uk. We will promptly correct any information found to be incorrect.