Acceptable Use Policy

1. Scope

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") applies to:

• Anything you upload to or publish through SinceCode — pages, media, form submissions, custom HTML and CSS.
• How you use the Service itself — the editor, the dashboard, our APIs and our public endpoints.
• The behaviour of anyone you authorise to use your account or to act on its behalf.

If you allow another person to use your SinceCode-built site to publish content (for example a contributor or guest author), you are responsible for their compliance with this AUP.

2. Prohibited content

You must not publish content that:

• Is illegal in the UK — including content that breaches the Online Safety Act 2023, the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the Terrorism Acts, the Equality Act 2010, the Computer Misuse Act 1990, or any UK financial-services, gambling, drug, weapon, animal-welfare, anti-counterfeiting or data-protection law.
• Infringes intellectual property — copyright, trade marks, design rights or database rights belonging to a third party.
• Is sexually explicit, pornographic, or depicts non-consensual intimate imagery. Adult content is not permitted on the platform.
• Sexualises, endangers, or exploits children — including any content depicting minors in a sexual context, grooming material, or content likely to be accessed by children that contains harmful material under the Children's Code categories.
• Promotes terrorism or extreme violence — including content that glorifies, encourages or radicalises towards terrorism or serious violence.
• Harasses, doxxes, defames, or threatens any identifiable person, or incites hatred against a group defined by a protected characteristic under the Equality Act 2010.
• Is fraudulent or deceptive — phishing, fake storefronts, scam landing pages, impersonation of a person or organisation, fake reviews, false health/financial claims.
• Distributes malware — viruses, ransomware, cryptominers, keyloggers, drive-by exploit code, or anything designed to compromise visitors' devices.
• Promotes the sale of regulated goods or services to UK consumers without the licences UK law requires — weapons, illegal drugs, prescription-only medicines, gambling, unregulated financial products, or counterfeit goods.

3. Prohibited behaviour

You must not use the Service to:

• Send unsolicited bulk email ("spam") via SinceCode Forms or any other feature; harvest email addresses; or violate the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 (PECR).
• Operate a service that primarily exists to generate visitor traffic to or from a SinceCode-built site for the purpose of inflating analytics, defrauding ad networks, or manipulating SEO.
• Run automated tooling (scraping, scanners, bots) against the Service or other customers' sites without our written permission, beyond the limits stated in the published rate-limit policy.
• Probe, scan, penetration-test, reverse-engineer or attempt to interfere with the Service's security or availability. (For coordinated disclosure see our /.well-known/security.txt — or email security@sincecode.com.)
• Circumvent plan limits, usage counters, billing, or content-moderation controls.
• Use the Service to compete directly with SinceCode by reselling our infrastructure as a website-builder of your own.
• Use any feature in a way that imposes a disproportionate load on the Service or that we reasonably consider abusive or disruptive to other customers.

4. Use of your customer site

Where your SinceCode-built site collects personal data from visitors (for example via a contact form), you are the data controller for that data and SinceCode is the processor. You must:

• Show your visitors a clear privacy notice that meets UK GDPR Articles 13/14.
• Obtain valid consent for any non-essential cookies you set via custom HTML or third-party scripts.
• Honour PECR Reg. 22 for any marketing you send to those visitors (opt-in, unsubscribe).

Our Data Processing Agreement sets out the controller/processor split.

5. How we enforce this AUP

If we receive a report or detect content or behaviour that we believe breaches this AUP, we may:

1. Investigate — including reviewing the relevant content, logs and account activity.
2. Require remediation — we may ask you to remove the content or stop the behaviour within a stated period.
3. Restrict the Service — we may suspend or restrict specific features, sites or accounts.
4. Remove content — we may take down the specific content without prior notice where it is clearly illegal, depicts child sexual abuse, presents an imminent safety risk, or where notice would prejudice an investigation.
5. Terminate — for serious or repeated breaches we may close the account under section 9 of the Terms of Service.
6. Report to authorities — we report suspected child sexual abuse material to the Internet Watch Foundation and the National Crime Agency, and we cooperate with lawful requests from UK regulators (ICO, Ofcom, HMRC) and police.

You can appeal any enforcement action by replying to the notification email. We aim to acknowledge appeals within 2 working days and decide within 10 working days.

6. Reporting a breach

To report content or behaviour that you believe breaches this AUP, follow our Content Takedown & Complaints Policy. The fastest route is abuse@sincecode.com; for child safety emergencies use the IWF hotline at report.iwf.org.uk in parallel.

7. Changes

We update this AUP from time to time as new abuse patterns emerge. Substantial changes (those that genuinely tighten what you may do with the Service) are flagged in the version history at /acceptable-use/history and notified in-product.