This is the agreement between you and The Blog. Signing up agrees to it. The pledge is the other thing you sign, and it is about your writing, not about us.
This is the membership agreement linked from signup. By signing up, you agree to these terms. Before using a new membership, you explicitly confirm your agreement to these Terms, acknowledge the Privacy Policy, confirm that you are at least eighteen, and sign the separate writing pledge. It is written in plain words on purpose, because an agreement nobody can read is an agreement nobody agreed to. It is long because it covers everything, and you should read it, and most people will not.
"The Blog" means this service, operated by Actual Intelligence Labs LLC. "You" means you, the person signing. This agreement is between you and The Blog, and it starts the moment you join and lasts as long as your account does. Some parts of it, the ones about bans, appeals, liability and the writing you leave behind, keep going after your account ends. Those parts say so where they appear.
You need a valid invitation from a member or an operator. Signup is available through that invitation, and your verified sign-in email or phone number must match its intended recipient. An invitation is not transferable to a different recipient. You need to be at least eighteen years old. You need to be one person, signing for yourself, using one account. You may not sign for somebody else, sign on behalf of a company, or hold two accounts. If you were banned and have not been cleared on appeal, you may not come back under a new address, a new invitation or a new name, and doing so is a breach of this agreement on its own.
The Blog may maintain clearly labelled, operator-managed accounts solely for app-store review, quality assurance and safety testing. An authorized operator manages these accounts; they must not impersonate real people. They use the same invitation, authentication, membership, moderation and access controls as other accounts. This limited exception does not let members create extra accounts or evade restrictions.
The Blog Invitations lets you ask The Blog to send a one-time invitation text on your behalf. Choose each recipient individually and review their name, number and message. By choosing “Confirm and send invitations,” you expressly state that each selected person already agreed to receive that one-time text from The Blog. Only confirm if that statement is true. Contact access alone is not permission to send texts. You receive no reward for sending invitations.
One invitation text per person. Message and data rates may apply. There are no recurring invitation messages or reminders. Recipients can reply STOP to opt out or HELP for help, or contact Support. Carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages. Delivery is not guaranteed, and we do not automatically retry failed or uncertain invitation texts. Verification codes requested for sign-in are a separate service.
We privately store your statement, its version, your account identifier and public name, the selected recipients, and the confirmation time. These records and a minimal per-number delivery guard survive invitation expiry, revocation, and account deletion to investigate complaints and prevent repeat invitation texts. Our Privacy Policy explains this processing and how to request a review. This specific confirmation is separate from agreeing to these general Terms and from your device's contact permission.
The separate writing pledge is the rule of the place: real thoughts, real opinions and real life. Write your own posts and comments without AI writing or rewriting them. Do not present an invented identity, experience or expertise as real, sell through your posts, or withhold the point for status, sales or engagement. That includes vagueposting used as attention bait. Pen names, privacy, personal boundaries, honest uncertainty and disagreement are allowed. The pledge explains these distinctions. Breaking it can lead to restrictions or a ban; pledge bans can appear on the public record described below.
Members report writing they believe broke the pledge. A person reviews every report. A report is an allegation, not a verdict. LARPing and gatekeeping post reports require the reporter to explain the specific concern; disagreement or a demand for private proof is not enough. Private community and safety reports about comments and profiles use the unscored private review queue. If we decide a pledge ban is warranted, your account is banned and an entry goes on the Banned List, which is a public page anybody on the internet can read without an account.
Read this paragraph twice, because it is the one people are surprised by. That entry names you by the display name and handle you chose, shows the picture on your account, quotes our reason for the ban in our own words, and shows the piece of your writing that the ban was based on, including anything attached to it. The record stays public while the account exists, unless a safety restriction removes it. Account deletion removes your public identity and original evidence, as section 9 explains.
By signing, you agree to all of that happening, and you give up the right to come after us for it. Specifically, you will not bring any claim against The Blog, the people who run it, or the members who reported you, arising out of the publication of a ban entry about you or the appeal record that goes with it. That includes claims for defamation, libel, slander, false light, invasion of privacy, publication of private facts, emotional distress, harm to your reputation, harm to your business, and anything else of that shape by any other name. You agree that being named on the Banned List is a thing you consented to, in writing, before you ever posted anything here.
We decide what breaks the pledge. We can be wrong, and the appeal is how you say so. What we do not do is take an entry down because it is embarrassing.
Every ban can be appealed once. You file it using your private appeal link. Ban notices use the email on record when one is available. If you do not have that email or cannot find your link, use the support form so an operator can verify the request and help you reach your appeal. An open appeal does not restore membership access. We read it and we decide, and then we publish the whole thing: your argument, our answer, and the reasoning, win or lose.
If you win, the ban entry comes off the Banned List, your account works again, your page carries an Exonerated badge that opens the full record, and The Blog posts an apology naming you. If you lose, the ban is permanent, the record stays up, and there is no second appeal. Either way the appeal record itself is public while the account exists, unless a safety restriction removes it, and the paragraph above about not suing us covers it exactly as it covers the ban.
The account itself: your verified sign-in email or phone number, account identifier, the name and handle you choose, your picture, your bio, and the date and signature on your pledge. For new pledge signings, we also keep a private record of the Terms and Privacy Policy versions you confirmed, your eighteen-or-older acknowledgement, and when you confirmed them. We do not collect a birth date for that acknowledgement or invent records for earlier signings. You can download this record, and account deletion removes it. Google is the current sign-in provider; phone sign-in and verification are optional when available. Google provides your account identifier, verified email, and profile information used to set up the account. Your sign-in email and phone are not published on your profile. An email on record can be used for service notices, bans and appeals.
Invitations: the name and destination email or phone number an inviter provides, compared in normalized form when checking who may join, the sponsor where applicable, and the link's creation, expiry, revocation and use information. The inviter can see the destination they supplied and the link's status. A different sign-in identity used in a failed attempt is not disclosed to the inviter. Expiry prevents a link from being used; it does not erase its record.
Finding friends is optional. Contact access requires your choice and device permission, and matching requires your verified phone number. Contact names stay on your device during matching. Numbers submitted for matching are processed temporarily and are not retained as an address book. An invitation you separately choose to create retains the individually selected names and destinations you confirm, as described above. Discoverability is a separate choice, off by default. The privacy policy explains matching, sharing, and how to change these choices.
What you do here: everything. The pieces you publish, the comments you write, the messages you send, who you follow, who follows you, what you like, what you save, what you repost, what you report, what you search for, and which pieces you open and when. Ordinary technical records come with that: your device and browser, your rough location from your network address, the times you visit, and which pages you asked for.
We order your feed with it. Your front page is ranked on our servers, from what you follow, like, save, comment on and read. There is no version of this where the ranking happens only on your own machine and we never see it, and if you have read that somewhere older, it is out of date and this paragraph is what is true.
We run the site with it, keep it working, find and fix problems, and enforce the pledge with it, which includes using your own activity as evidence in a report, a ban, or an appeal.
There are no ads or advertising SDKs on The Blog today. Future advertising or material changes to data use will require updated disclosures and applicable choices before implementation. Joining now does not grant blanket consent to future advertising uses. We do not sell your email address.
We use the ordinary storage a website uses: cookies to keep you signed in, and your browser's own storage for small conveniences like remembering which tab you were on. Turning those off will break signing in.
We hand your information to other people only in these cases: the companies that host the site, store the files, send requested email or text messages, or screen submitted content for safety and help us moderate, who only handle it to do that job; a legal demand we are required to answer; and a sale or transfer of The Blog, in which case the new owner takes this agreement with it.
Where enabled, automated safety screening helps us decide whether submitted content needs private human review before publication. The Privacy Policy describes which screening is active, the content involved, and how it is handled. Automatic checks do not certify that content is safe or replace the reporting and human review process.
You own what you write. You are giving us permission to store it, show it, copy it as needed to serve it, and display it inside The Blog and on the public pages this agreement describes, for as long as it is here. That permission is free, worldwide, and lasts as long as the writing does. You are not giving us the right to sell your writing to somebody else as writing.
You are promising that what you post is yours to post: that you wrote it yourself, without a machine writing it for you, and that it does not steal anybody else's work, break anybody's copyright, or violate anybody's privacy.
You can delete your account at any time, from your settings, and it takes your pieces, your comments, your profile and your files with it. Your identity and original evidence are also removed from public ban and appeal pages. We retain a minimal private enforcement record, including the canonical sign-in identity and decision, to prevent evasion of active bans or private suspensions. What other people wrote stays theirs: their side of a conversation with you, and their pieces that mention you, are their writing, not yours. If a service cannot finish removal, a private cleanup job remains until it succeeds. If you cannot sign in, use the account deletion request form at /account-deletion; we verify ownership before acting.
No writing produced by a machine, which is the pledge. No harassment, threats, or targeting a person. No pornography or gratuitous graphic gore or violence. Non-graphic discussion of health, news, education or personal experiences is allowed when it respects these rules. No sexual content involving minors, ever, and we report it. No stolen work. No selling, pitching, spamming, or promoting. No scraping, crawling, or automated collection of anything here. No attempt to get at another member's account or at parts of the site you were not given. No transferring an invitation to a different recipient or helping somebody we banned get around the invitation rules. No pretending to be somebody you are not or inventing a life, credentials or expertise to pass off as real. No gatekeeping or vagueposting to extract status, engagement or sales. Keeping personal information private and setting boundaries are allowed.
We can suspend or end your account, remove writing, or refuse an invitation, at our discretion, with or without warning, for a breach of this agreement or of the pledge. We can also shut the whole site down. You are not owed money, notice, or an explanation for that, though bans get one anyway, because the Banned List is how this place stays honest.
Account suspensions are reviewed privately and do not create a public Banned List entry. While suspended, you cannot use member features or invite people, and your writing and profile content are hidden. You can request a private review through Support and can still request account deletion. Lifting a suspension does not automatically restore separately restricted content, revoke an independent ban, or reactivate old invitations.
The Blog is provided as it is, with no promises of any kind. We do not promise it will be available, that it will not lose data, that it will be free of errors, or that anything another member writes here is true, safe, legal or worth your time. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim every warranty, expressed or implied, including any implied warranty that the site is merchantable, fit for any particular purpose, or free of infringement.
To the fullest extent the law allows, The Blog and the people who run it are not liable to you for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, lost writing, lost business, or harm to your reputation, however it happened and whatever the legal theory, even if we were told it might happen. To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability to you for everything, added together, is capped at one hundred United States dollars, or the amount you have paid us, whichever is greater. You have not paid us anything.
Nothing in this section takes away a right that the law where you live does not let you give up. Where that is the case, this section applies as far as it can and no further.
If a third party makes a claim against The Blog because of something you posted or did here, you will cover us for it: our losses, our costs, and our legal fees. We get to choose our own lawyers.
This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Florida, without regard to its rules about which state's law applies. Any dispute that this agreement does not already settle goes to the state or federal courts sitting in Sarasota County, Florida, and you agree that those courts have you and that this is a convenient place. You bring a claim as yourself and not as part of a class, a collective, or a representative action.
Any claim you have against us has to be brought within one year of the thing you are complaining about. After that it is gone.
We can change these terms. If we change something that matters, we will say so on the site and in Alerts, and the date at the bottom of this page will move. Staying here after that is how you agree to the new version. If you do not agree, delete your account, which you can do at any time in your settings.
This agreement and the separate pledge are the whole agreement between you and The Blog, and they replace anything said anywhere else, including anything an older version of this site claimed. If a court decides one part of this cannot stand, the rest of it still does. If we do not enforce something right away, that does not mean we gave it up. You cannot hand this agreement to somebody else; we can, if The Blog changes hands.
If you need to reach us, use the private support form. It works without an account. Use the account deletion page for deletion requests and the child safety contact for concerns about a child. The privacy notice describes current data practices.
Last updated 2026-10-03.