Web-site and Forum User Terms and Conditions

The following Terms and Conditions will apply to you when using the Alliance for Finance Web-site or Forum [AF hereafter].

You agree to accept and be bound by these terms and conditions as outlined below. Should you reject the following terms and conditions and not wish to be bound by them, then use of AF is prohibited to you.

We may update these terms and conditions from time to time without any notice to You. In addition to the following terms and conditions, You agree also to be bound by any guidelines or announcements that are made during your membership of AF. In addition, when using particular sections of AF, You shall be subject to any posted guidelines or rules applicable to such services, which may be posted from time to time. All such guidelines or rules are hereby incorporated by reference into the Terms and Conditions.

1. Definitions

These definitions shall apply to the following terms and conditions in their entirety.

The term "You" or "Your" within these terms and conditions shall be accepted to refer to you, the user of AF. The term "We" or "Us" or "AF" refers to the Alliance for Finance web-site or forum, and includes its members. The term "Registration Information" refers to any and all information that is provided by You to Us. The term "Member" refers to the members of AF either individually as users of the forum, or as a group in the form of member organisations. The term "Content" refers to but is not confined to text, links or images found within this web site or forum.

2. Acceptable Behaviour

Your use of AF shall be in accordance with these conditions, which are non-negotiable.

You agree that you will not:

Post, transmit, upload, email or otherwise make available any content that you do not have a right to make available under any law or under contractual or fiduciary relationships, such as for example, inside information, confidential or proprietary information gained or disclosed as a part of employment relationships, or under agreements of non-disclosure.

Post, transmit, upload, email or otherwise make available any content that in doing so infringes upon a trademark, patent, copyright, trade secret or other proprietary rights of any party.

Post, transmit, upload, email or otherwise make available any material that contains software viruses, computer code, programs or files that are designed to interrupt, limit the functionality of or destroy any computer hardware or software, or telecommunications equipment.

Post, transmit, upload, email or otherwise make available any content that is illegal, abusive, harassing, defamatory, confidential, harmful, threatening, vulgar, libellous, invasive of another’s privacy, or ethnically, racially or otherwise objectionable.

Impersonate any person or entity, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with another person or entity.

Manipulate or forge headers or identifiers with the intention of disguising the origin of any content that you provide to the Alliance for Finance web site.

Register or post in excess of one account with Us. Should it come to our attention that you have registered more than one account, we may remove your posting rights, therefore prohibiting your participation on AF.

3. Forum Use

This section governs use of the discussion forum, and applies to all users either directly or indirectly, registered or otherwise.

You agree that you will not:

Provoke others or cause trouble. If you wish to argue with people then go to instant messenger or email.

Make personal attacks on anyone during your use of the forum. Do not abuse someone for example, because of their race, colour, sex, sexual orientation or religious beliefs. This list is not exhaustive.

Re-ignite inflammatory threads by creating new threads after existing threads on the same topic have been closed or deleted.

Use offensive or inappropriate language at any time.

Attempt to take threads off-topic or make off-topic posts within threads. Off topic posts may be removed at our discretion. The section marked as a designated "off-topic" area is more relaxed on off-topic posts.

Argue a moderators decision publicly. Any and all complaints directed at a moderating decision should first be addressed to the moderator in question via private message. If the problem can not be resolved, then You should state Your position to the Secretary via the contact us link, who will make or change any and/or all final decisions on a democratic basis.

Reproduce messages sent using the forum Private Messaging function on the forum or anywhere else without permission from the sender, unless requested to by an administrator for site administration purposes.

Signatures may not contain adverts of any sort unless previously agreed by Us. Please also keep text signatures under 4 lines.

Provide links to third party web sites or content unless given express permission to do so by a moderator or administrator. The exception to this condition is links, which are shown to be relevant to any discussion taking place, which will be permitted within the context of that discussion. We may remove third party links at any time with or without explanation.

You agree that:

We may, for content management purposes, move a forum thread to a more appropriate forum area if We feel that it is situated in the incorrect forum area.

We may, for content management purposes, close a thread. This would usually be because the discussion in the thread is not moving along, users are not covering new points, or that the discussion is going around in circles. We would also consider whether the discussion is interesting or motivates participation in the context of the forum subject matter.

We may use an infraction system to warn of inappropriate conduct. Infractions attach points to user’s accounts and expire after a set time period. The points used, and time limits vary with the offence severity. Accounts will be suspended if the total current points reach or exceed 5, and are only restored after expiry of sufficient points to drop the total below this limit.

When an infraction is issued, or an account is suspended you may contact the Administrator to clarify the matter if you so wish. If appropriate, your comments will be reviewed by the Administrator. Removal or alteration of the infraction will only be considered if, in the opinion of the Administrator, a clear mistake occurred. Infractions over 28 days old will not be removed or altered for any reason. Abusive private messages to the Administrator may attract a longer suspension or even a permanent ban. We reserve the right to permanently ban spammers and persistent troublemakers.

The Alliance for Finance Forum is a UK based, English speaking forum, unless you receive prior permission, all posts, articles, signatures or other submissions should be made in English. This is so that we may verify their meaning.

4. Third Party Web sites

You accept that we cannot be held responsible for any third party Web-sites that you may access through AF, and further agree that any third party content is not our responsibility. We do not endorse any third party Web sites or content unless clearly stated, and therefore cannot be held liable or responsible for any promotion, content, service or product that is located on a third party web site. We further cannot be held liable or responsible for any loss or damage, offence that may be caused, or that you allege has been caused by third party content or Web sites.

All and any contact that you have with third parties or Web sites that you may come into contact with during your use of this web-site of forum, including but not limited to payments for products or services, any conditions made, warranties offered, or contracts entered into, are your responsibility and not the responsibility of The Alliance for Finance.

5. Our Rights

You will acknowledge and accept that the AF web-site and forum contains a large and varied amount of content. We do not check content posted by you prior to it being placed on the forum. We therefore reserve the right to remove or delete in part or in its entirety any content that you submit should We feel that it violates these terms and conditions, or any guidelines or announcements that may be available to view elsewhere on AF.

You will acknowledge and accept that we are neither liable nor responsible for the content that you submit. We will monitor such content as appropriate and act accordingly should we be informed of, or consider any material objectionable.

You will acknowledge and accept that we have the right to temporarily or permanently remove your ability to post content, and that we further have the right to ban you from AF should you break any of these Terms and Conditions.

You acknowledge and accept that in certain circumstances we have the right to provide information to your ISP at our discretion following but not limited to severe disruption by you, the provision of illegal or abusive content, any attempts made by you to re-register after being banned, or for any other reason that involves you breaking these Terms and Conditions.

You will acknowledge that reproduction of material from this web site without prior written permission is strictly prohibited. All contributions to this site are also copyright of the site owner.

You acknowledge and accept that if you are permanently banned from use of the Alliance for Finance web site or forum, you will not in any way attempt to re-register using any other name or identity not known to us, or any other email address not known to us. If you do so, we will pursue the maximum penalty available under your Internet Service Providers Acceptable Use Policy.

We hope that by complying with these terms and conditions of use, we do not spoil your enjoyment of our web-site or forum.

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