Terms of use

1. Who you are agreeing with

FLAPSS is operated by Flapss ("we", "us"). By creating an account or using the site you accept these terms. If you do not, please do not use it.

You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account, or 16 where the law where you live sets a higher age for consenting to online services on your own behalf.

2. Permanence — read this one

This site exists to keep answers rather than to cycle through them. That has consequences you should understand before you write anything:

• An answer is published at a permanent address. It does not expire, drop off a feed, or become unreachable with age.
• Revisions add, they do not overwrite. When you rewrite an answer, the new version becomes the current one on your profile and the version it replaced stays readable next to it. You cannot edit or delete an earlier version. Corrections made within the first day of publishing are folded in and not shown as history.
• Your handle is a permanent address too. Every link anyone makes to your answers runs through it, including links written by other people.
• You can retract. A retracted answer is struck through, excluded from every statistic, and stays at its address rather than vanishing, so that links to it do not break.
• You can also erase. Erasure is a separate and stronger thing than retraction, it is described in the privacy notice, and there are things it cannot undo. Permanence is the default here; it is not a trap.

3. What you write stays yours

You own what you write. Nothing here transfers copyright to us, and nothing here is exclusive — you remain free to publish the same words anywhere else.

You give us permission to do the things running the site actually requires: to store your answers, show them on FLAPSS, serve them over our public interface, include them in counts and summaries alongside other people's answers, and let others link to and quote them with attribution to you. That permission lasts as long as the answer is published and ends when it is erased.

It does not extend further than that. We do not sell what you write. We do not licence the body of answers to anyone else. If that ever changes it will be a separate, specific choice you make, off by default, and revocable — not a consequence of having signed up.

Answers written before you have seen anyone else's answer to the same question are the only ones that count towards a published statistic. Answers to the most sensitive questions are never aggregated at all, and never used to promote the site.

4. What we ask of you

Do not use FLAPSS to:

• Impersonate anyone. Answer as yourself. Writing in another person's voice, or in the first person as a public figure, is the one thing this site is least able to tolerate, because its whole value rests on a reader being able to trust who said something.
• Publish false statements of fact about an identifiable person or organisation, or material that harasses, threatens or is intended to intimidate someone.
• Publish someone else's private information, or anything you do not have the right to publish.
• Post paid or sponsored recommendations without saying so, or operate more than one account in order to make an opinion look more widely held than it is.
• Scrape the site at a rate that degrades it for other people, or republish the body of answers stripped of who wrote them and where they came from.

Questions submitted to the bank are reviewed before they appear. Answers are published immediately and reviewed if someone reports them.

5. Profiles we built without being asked

Some profiles belong to public figures who have not joined and have not endorsed FLAPSS. They are marked as such on the page itself. Every entry on them is a direct quotation of a published statement, carrying its publication, date and source link; an entry that cannot be sourced is not published. They are never presented as answers given to us, they never appear in statistics, and a likeness is not used before the profile is claimed.

If a managed profile is about you, the link on the page lets you claim it, correct it or have it removed, without an account. A removal request is honoured without argument — we do not ask you to justify it.

6. Reporting, and what we do about it

Every answer carries a way to report it, and you do not need an account to use it. We aim to respond within 5 working days, and faster than 48 hours where someone's safety is at stake. We would rather publish a target we can meet than one that reads better.

Where a report is upheld we may hide an answer, retract it, or remove an account. Where a report concerns something said about a named person or organisation, that person is entitled to reply and to have the reply carried in the same place. Removing something from public view does not erase the record that it was there.

7. Suspension and leaving

We can suspend or close an account that breaks section 4, and will say why unless doing so would put someone at risk. You can close yours at any time; what happens to your answers when you do is set out in the privacy notice, and it is worth reading before you write rather than after.

8. What we do not promise

FLAPSS is provided as it is. We work to keep it available and intact, but we do not guarantee that it will be uninterrupted, that it will never lose data, or that it will exist forever, and you should keep your own copy of anything you would be sorry to lose. You can ask us for a copy of everything you have written, including every revision.

Answers here are the opinions of the people who wrote them. We do not verify them and publishing one is not an endorsement of it. Nothing on this site is professional, medical, legal or financial advice.

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of the site. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

9. Changes

If these terms change in a way that affects what you have already written, we will describe the change on this page and tell account holders before it takes effect, rather than swapping the document out and updating a date.

10. Reaching us

Use the contact form. It reaches a person, not an inbox nobody reads, and it works whether or not you have an account.