TWC Official:Terms of Service

Terms of Service

Total War Center provides the services to you, the visitor, based on its Terms of Service outlined here. When using the services provided by TWC, you are subject to these posted terms. Usage of the services on this site indicates acceptance of these terms. The TOS may be changed at any time and without direct notice to individual visitors, so it is recommended that you check back with this page at any time you have questions or concerns.

Registration Requirements

In order to view messages on the TWCenter message boards without user restrictions, no registration is required or necessary. In order to post messages on the boards, and use other advanced services, you must register with TWCenter using a valid e-mail address. Upon registration, an Activation Key in the form of a URL will be mailed to the address you provided. You must visit this URL using the web browser of your choice to activate the account. No posting privileges are granted until the account is activated.

TWCenter does not require you to use your real name or other identification that can be easily traced to you, and the e-mail address you provide will be kept private. In order to register on TWCenter, registrants must be 13 years of age or older. TWCenter does not knowingly collect any information from any users under 13 years, and if it is found that an underage user has fraudulently registered, their account will immediately be terminated.

Content Notice

By viewing the site content, you agree that all content on the TWCenter message boards is the responsibility of the person from which the content originated. You agree that neither TWCenter nor its sponsors or affiliates are responsible for all content that you personally post or upload. TWCenter does not directly control any content posted on the boards, and does not guarantee the truthfulness or quality of any content.

You agree that while using the TWCenter message boards, you may be exposed to content that is offensive or objectionable, and that you will in no way hold TWCenter nor its sponsors or affiliates liable in any way, shape, or form for any harm or loss that may come to you or others as a result of viewing this content. TWCenter is not responsible for screening content before it is posted, although an offensive language filter is installed on the system that will reject certain posts that may contain certain words deemed offensive or used most often in an offensive way.

Account Responsibilty

Users are solely responsible for protecting their accounts from access by others. You are strongly encouraged to select a hard-to-guess password and not re-use that password on any other sites where it may be read by the owners or administrators of that site.

While it is acceptable for users to maintain multiple accounts on TWCenter, TWC can and does track multiple shared accounts from a single or multiple computers as one account in terms of TOS violations. If the TOS is violated severely enough to warrant the banning of one account, all known accounts shared between a single or multiple users who use the same computer may also be banned for the actions of the violating account at the administrators' discretion.

Because of this rule, it is highly recommended that board users do not share their accounts with others, nor share their computers used to access the site with others, as the actions of some other person could easily directly impact all known shared message board accounts.

Privacy and Release of Information

Under normal circumstances, TWCenter will never release your provided information to any third party without a court order requiring us to do so. However, in cases of certain severe and/or repeated TOS violations or illegal activities, we reserve the right to forward any and all known information about you and your accounts to your ISP (including libraries, schools, and places of employment), e-mail service provider, your ISP account owner (if someone else is actually paying for it), and any parties whose copyright has clearly been infringed by your actions on the boards.

To view TWC's full privacy policy, see below.

Member Conduct

You agree that you will not use any aspect of this service, including the wiki and private messages, to perform the following actions:

1. Signature Size Violation (1 point)

   Members may not use signatures where the total size in bytes of all signature images combined is more than 250 KB.

2. Off-topic Posting (1 or 2 points)

   Topicality is expected and will be enforced on all forums, so take the extra time to post on the proper forum. Examples of off-topic posting include, but are not limited to:

   • Threads that are not related to the topic of the forum in question, or that contain no material that can reasonably be discussed
   • Posts that are not related to the topic of the thread in question, or that contain no material that can reasonably be discussed
   • Re-posting threads that you know have already been posted elsewhere
   • Unsolicited advertisement for any website, product, service, or facility not first approved by TWC staff

   You can advertise websites, products, etc. in your signature, avatar, or other profile fields, as long as you post productively and don't just try to get exposure for your advertisements. Recommendation of websites, products, or other resources are also allowed if relevant to legitimate discussions.

3. Censor Bypassing (1 or 2 points)

   Attempting to bypass the censor by misspelling, inserting spaces or symbols, transposing letters, using look-alike symbols, or any other method is not allowed. For example, if "gris" is a banned word:

   • Not allowed: g-r-i-s, gr*s, g***, 9|-1$, girs, gryeeeas, grizznizz, **** (rhymes with "bris")
   • Allowed: ****, ****ed, ****ing, g'ed, g-word

   Prohibited words may not be used in images or videos embedded in posts. If external websites use prohibited words, you can link to them only if you post a warning alongside the link.

4. Hard-to-Read Posts (1 or 2 points)

   Posts that disrupt the message boards for other users, intentional or not, are prohibited. This includes, but is not limited, to:

   • Conducting conversations in foreign languages, outside designated forums
   • Posting excessively in capital letters, leet speak, or other hard-to-read writing styles
   • Using misleading topic titles
   • Consecutive posting. (I.e., double posts, triple posts)

5. Insulting Others (3 or 6 points)

   Posts clearly insulting other board members, individually or as a group, directly or indirectly, are not allowed. This includes, but is not limited to:

   • Name-calling ("You're an idiot", "You moron")
   • Direct insults ("Screw you")
   • Offensive orders ("Go kill yourself")
   • Using threatening, harassing, defamatory, hate-speech, or libelous language
   • Using race, religion, sexual orientation, culture, ethnicity, handicap, nationality, or gender as a means of insult, either directly or implied
   • Insinuations ("Are you stupid or something?") or insults towards family ("Your mom...")

   Instead, members should criticize the post, not the poster. SEGA, the Creative Assembly, and related bodies are considered board members for this purpose, since some of them are. You can still criticize their games without insulting them personally.

6. Obscene Content (3 or 6 points)

   Patently offensive content is not allowed. This includes, but is not limited to:

   • Providing images or videos displaying genitals or exposed breasts except in a serious and non-titillating context
   • Providing images or videos of sexual intercourse (implicit or explicit), excessive gore, or other patently obscene material
   • Providing verbal descriptions or details about any sexual act or sexual organs

   If external websites use reasonably (not excessively) obscene content, such as mild nudity or reasonable levels of gore, you can link to them if you post a warning alongside the link. Likewise, embedded material that is not overly obscene can be provided if thread viewers must actively click a button to see it (e.g., spoiler boxes or embedded YouTube videos), and it is accompanied by a warning.

7. Using Modders' Work Without Permission (3 or 6 points)

   Using or distributing part or all of any Total War modification without permission is prohibited.

8. Evading a Suspension (3 or 6 points)

   Users whose right to post on the forums has been suspended or revoked must not create additional accounts to evade the ban. In addition to the normal penalties for warnings, the user's ban may be extended, and the additional account they made will be banned indefinitely.

9. Impersonation (4 points)

   Falsely claiming to be another specific message board member or other known individual is not allowed. Neither is falsely claiming to be a moderator, administrator, Creative Assembly employee, or other authority figure. Moderators may use discretion in enforcing this against impersonations that are clearly not serious and so unlikely to fool anyone.

10. Promoting Illegal Activities (4 or 8 points)

    Posts that incite others to violate the law are not allowed. This includes, but is not limited to, asking for or providing:

    • Illegal copies of copyrighted software (ROMs, Warez)
    • Methods of circumventing copyright protection (Cracks, CD Keys, mod chips)
    • Illegal copies of copyrighted music (MP3s), movies, videos, or any other type of media (including in Mods)
    • Copies of original Total War game files
    • Methods of cheating in online games

11. Harassment or Invasion of Privacy (4 or 8 points)

    Continual harassing behavior directed towards a certain individual or group with the intent of creating an intimidating, offensive, or hostile environment on the boards, with or without use of explicit or implicit threats is prohibited. Posting private information without permission is also prohibited.

12. Other

    Any other activity that is clearly detrimental to the flow of conversation and normal activities of the boards and its users may also be deleted, and responsible users may be penalized at the discretion of the Chief of Moderation.

Terms Violations

Infractions of the terms of service are tracked using the infraction system, which allows moderators to record incidents in a reliable and centralized fashion. All such records of infractions are viewable in the user's profile to moderating staff and the user in question, but no one else.

Note

Notes are given when the actions of a member require staff to officially contact them. They are simply a record of that contact and do not contribute toward a member's warning level. They are recorded both to let other moderators know that the user has been informed of the particular rule, and to give the user a record of all contacts with moderators they have had.

Warning

Warnings are given when a member commits an offense (other than a very mild one) when the member should already know the rule in question, such as if a moderator has previously discussed that type of offense with them. Warnings expire after three months and contribute toward a member's warning level. How many levels an offense is worth can be found in the Member Conduct section in (parentheses). Whether to give the first or second number, if applicable, is up to moderator discretion.

Warning Levels

Warning levels are penalized as follows:

4	Can neither give nor receive reputation
8	Suspension for 1 day and no custom title or invisible mode
12	Suspension for 3 days and cannot use avatar/signature/profile picture
16	Suspension for 7 days and placement in probation

Penalties (other than suspensions and bans) last until the warning level is reduced below the specified penalty. Time during which a user is banned may not counted toward the expiration of warning levels.

Privacy Policy Statement

Definitions

"Visitor" refers to any person who is not a registered member of this site who is viewing it using a web browser.

"Member" refers any person who is a registered member of this site.

Policy

This is the web site of Total War Center.

You may contact us at http://www.twcenter.net/forums/sendmessage.php.

Other than in logs and other generally temporary media, which are kept private, TWC does not record any information on its servers regarding visitors that has not been deliberately submitted to it. IP and e-mail addresses used by members may be stored indefinitely for record-keeping purposes. Cookies are used to track the activities of members on the forum only, to permit features such as "last activity" in the member profile. Members may hide this information from those who are not TWC staff by setting this option in their user control panel. In this case, staff will treat the information as confidential. TWC does not use any device to track activities on other sites.

For purposes of validation, registered members of our forum are required to provide a valid email address. This email may be accessed by moderators of the forum, and if a user enables e-mail from other users, his or her e-mail address may become viewable by members of the public. TWC will never disclose your email address to third parties, and use by moderating staff is for the enforcement of the Terms of Service only.

TWC does not send unsolicited bulk e-mail. Bulk e-mails are only sent to users who have explicitly requested them in their settings. To disable e-mail from TWC, edit your forum settings and/or your wiki preferences. Even if you do this, moderators or administrators may send personalized, non-bulk e-mails to you for purposes related to the running of the site.

If you supply us with your postal address online, you will only receive the information for which you provided us your address. Your address details will not be stored for future reference, and will be deleted once requested information has been supplied.

To try and bring you offers that are of interest to you, we have relationships with other companies that we allow to place ads on our Web pages. As a result of your visit to our site, ad server companies may collect information such as your domain type, your IP address and clickstream information. For further information, consult the privacy policies of Google Ads.

We have appropriate security measures in place in our physical facilities to protect against the loss, misuse or alteration of information that we have collected from you at our site.

If you feel that this site is not following its stated information policy, you may contact or us using the following URL: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/sendmessage.php.

This site is in full compliance with the terms of COPPA. In furtherance of this, those visitors under the age of 13, wishing to become registered members of the site must get permission from an appropriate parent or guardian, and provide proof of this by completing this form. Failure to comply will result in the removal of your account, and the deletion of any details held by us about you.

Notwithstanding all of the above, TWC is a non-commercial site staffed fully by volunteers. It is not possible for us to rigorously brief all staff members on the full details of our privacy policy, and we do not have the means to seriously penalize staff members for breach of this policy. Furthermore, many staff members may be under the minimum age necessary to make legally binding agreements in their jurisdictions. TWC does not employ lawyers and cannot guarantee that the policy presented here is realistically enforceable in all cases. While we will not intentionally violate this policy as a matter of course and will take steps to discourage its violation, it should be viewed as advisory and non-binding. We cannot be held responsible for violation of this policy.

TWC's Probation System

If a user is a repeat offender he may enter in the probationary system. This is decided in one of two ways: (1) A members warning level reaches 16. (2) A member is enrolled by the Chief of Moderation following consultation with the moderating team. Any member of the moderating Staff can propose users for entry into this system.

How it works

• If a user is in the System every warning results in a suspension.
• The length of the suspension is decided by the Head of Moderation after consultation with the moderating team and it should not be shorter than a month.
• Subsequent suspensions during the probation period will increase in length.
• The length of probation period is decided by the Head of Moderation in consultation with the moderating team and should usually be no shorter than three months; the period restarts at the end of each suspension.
• The user in question is made fully aware of the rules and function of the system.
• Warnings acquired while on probation will result in a suspension and an upgrade to the next highest stage of probation (see below).

The Stages

• Stage One probation consists of a three month term with a one month suspension for any warnings acquired during that term.
• Stage Two probation consists of a six month term with a two month suspension for any warnings acquired during that term.
• Stage Three probation consists of a twelve month term with a four month suspension for any warnings acquired during that term.

And what about the "permaban"?

The permaban is reserved for cases of spambots and posting porn.