Vaxia is a not-for-profit, free-to-play, website.

We run on Drupal, an open source free webcode and we currently have a volunteer technical admin to handle code as needed. That doesn't mean we don't have costs, and in honor of Transparency this is how the costs for the site break down:

Once a year, we have a domain name purchase which is roughly 15$ a year.*

We are hosted on Linode, with site backups which brings us at the moment to 50$/month for hosting cost, with a lot of room for growth.

You'll notice we have a donation button (and if you haven't hit the yearly cap an option for selecting the character to put your site rewards to). That goes to a Paypal account under a vaxia-only email account, that technical admins (Tia and Bastlynn) have access to.

That account is used to automatically pay our hosting service to cover our costs - the display on the site is an estimate based on current use for how many months we have covered.

In short: We keep the Vaxia money completely separate from our personal stuff so we can be as transparent as possible on that end of things. If you ever have a donation that goes weird or you need to follow up on - drop a line to Bastlynn, or email vaxiauserone@gmail.com to ask.

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* I need to check with Tia on this.

These Terms and Conditions are valid across all Vaxia/Untold Paths projects, as stated below. Vaxia/Untold Paths reserves the right to change these terms and conditions without warning at any time.

Membership

Vaxia/Untold Paths reserves the right to approve and reject membership applications at its sole discretion.

Vaxia/Untold Paths reserves the right to promote, demote and remove members at any time. IP logs, Remote Hosts and all available info will be collected, displayed and used at Administration's discretion.

Contributions

Material submitted to untoldpaths.com, such as characters, setting information, and other text contributions are considered to be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

Vaxia/Untold Paths and it's members are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material

The author/licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as we follow the license terms.

Under the following terms:

Attribution — We must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

Non-commercial — We may not use the material for commercial purposes.

Share Alike — If we remix, transform, or build upon the material, we must distribute our contributions under the same license as the original.

No additional restrictions — We may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

For more information see here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
And the license here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode

By submitting the material, the author declares him/her self legally capable to submit the material, and fully responsible in the case of such contribution resulting in copyright/legal issues in detriment of Vaxia.

Protecting the privacy of our members is of great importance for us.

Vaxia, collects information (characters, and any contact information) voluntarily submitted by its players at the time of enrollment. This information is never released to any third party, and it remains in storage for Vaxia game-related-only purposes. Most of this information can be erased at the time the player leaves Vaxia, upon the player's request - for story continuity purposes we aren't going to be able to strip every mention of your character out of the site RP archives. But we can certainly forget your screen-name, email, and other settings if you would like. It can be seen in the player account page, and modified by the player at any time.

Vaxia may email its members at their given email address to inform them of important changes in their membership, including, but not limited to new character notifications, player-privilege removal, etc.

We do use cookies on this site to keep you logged in (that's how the Internet works guys), and we use them to keep track of which character has which character settings for image and text color settings to make it easier for you to play without thinking about what your settings are. Otherwise we try to keep most of our data on our end, and yours on yours.

Passwords are stored as hashes on our end. Think one-way encryption. Not even the admin can get them back out of the system for you. That's why we send a password reset link instead of sending you your password.

We encourage you to change them regularly and not to reuse your passwords!!

Use something like Last Pass if you can. (It's free and it really does help: LastPass ). If not, please consider the principles XKCD so kindly laid out for us all:

* Use a longer password over a shorter one.
* If you can't remember a unique password for each site, at least use a different one for the important ones: Bank, Gmail, etc.
* If you can - use a pass*phrase* over a password. It's easier to remember, and harder to crack.
* COMPLAIN to any website that can send you your password. They don't need to store that information to be able to log you in.
* And COMPLAIN LOUDLY if they send you that password in email. Email is terrifyingly insecure for something as important as that.

It's a dangerous Net out there guys, be safe.

As a non-profit site, Vaxia falls neatly into the safe zone of American Fair Use legislation of images:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

"In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

• the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
• the nature of the copyrighted work;
• the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
• the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."

In general, our character and account images fall well within these boundaries. To help guarantee that that continues to be the case:

• Images should be cropped where possible so that only a portion is used (say, the face on a portrait). The less of the total work is included, the safer we are in terms of Fair Use guidelines.
• Attribution (author name and link, whenever possible) should be given in the details for the picture, like before. That way we avoid impeding the ability of the artwork's creator to profit by it, if they see fit.

In other words, we can now use a wider range of art or photos on site without explicit author permission, though that's no reason not to give credit where it's due (see above).