As preparations are made to move to a new site, staff need to start putting together a Terms of Service and Privacy Policy document. The site has not needed one so far due to the blanket documents from Wikidot being applicable, but as Project Foundation will be a standalone website, I will need these relatively soon.
For those of you who are not familiar with what these are, the Terms of Service is a legal document that underlines what services the website entity provides, the terms under which said services are provided, and the terms under which said services may be revoked. In short, this document will contain (among other things) the rules by which users may be permanently and immediately banned from the site, such as spam or illegal activity.
A Privacy Policy is another legal document that outlines all personal information gathered by the website entity, and how that information is used. As the site really only gathers user emails and does not sell any of the information, this document will be simple and is the lesser concern.
A third issue is the issue of site licensing and content ownership. I am under the impression that the general opinion is that individual authors should not have the ability to make money off of their work, as their work would mean little without the framework of the Foundation. However, the site's current license explicitly allows commercial use and derivation, which would make such a policy unenforceable. In order to completely patch this hole, the Terms of Service would have to include such language as to say that any content submitted to the SCP Foundation would belong to the website entity, and no longer belongs to the individual author; that would place the fate of articles with administration. Now, whether this is the best course of action is up to administration; I am fairly sure that such a clause would alienate some authors and turn others from submitting in the first place. At the very least, staff should consider a more tightly controlled flavor of Creative Commons, such as the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs version. How such a change would take place is yet another issue, as I'm fairly sure we couldn't get away with simply yanking the rug out from under authors who already have submitted content; at the very least, users might have to sign an agreement to abide by the new license or have their works removed.
It doesn't need to be said that I am obviously not a lawyer. I've spoken to spikebrennan in passing about this, and he has had some concerns about what defines the website entity since there are no site owners or corporate entities that can assume legal liability for its activity. This will likely be a sticky issue that needs a lot of discussion, and I just wanted to make sure that it was on staff's plate moving forward.
If you need to see an example TOS or PP document, Wikidot's are linked at the bottom of every page.
