General:

This site is privately owned and paid for by Avrila Klaus; no one else has the inherent right to post or read here. By publishing it online I invite others to read it, and by making the comment feature available I invite them to post their own thoughts, but these invitations are conditional upon appropriate use as determined by me within the following guidelines.

Commenting:

By commenting, you agree that I may store and display your comments, license them under my site’s Creative Commons license, and use them in other non-commercial ways, at no cost. If I make any money directly from your comments (such as including them in a purely-hypothetical future book) I will make every effort to split the money proportionately.

Comments may not include other people’s personal information; they will be deleted, and the IP address may be banned after a second offense or egregious first offense (definiton at my discretion).

Stuff That’s Not Allowed:

Spam, pornography (visual or verbal), excessive profanity (at my discretion, usually following the guideline of “worse than would be expected from professionals in adult company” in recognition that aggravation or strong emotion may provoke an expletive now and then), anything violating my privacy policy, anything violating the rights of minors, or anything otherwise illegal will not be tolerated.

At my discretion I may remove the specific violation from a comment or delete the entire comment. At my discretion I may IP ban the author of a comment, which prevents both posting and viewing.

Readers are encouraged to e-mail me if they see any violations of the rules.

Intellectual Property:

My policy as well as the law’s demand is to respect other people’s intellectual property rights. I do occasionally use and attribute material from other authors in commentary, which I believe to be Fair Use. Such material is not covered under my site’s license.

The Creative Commons license of my blog’s content was revoked in September 2007 because I decided that normal Fair Use covers everything needed for legitimate blogosphere discussion. All other rights reserved. Credited excerpts by legitimate sites are fine. Search engine databases are fine. Sploggers are evil.

Privacy Policy

I occasionally write about events that involve other people.

When these are not personally identifiable (e. g. something I see random people outdoors doing) or when they happen in public internet places like the forums I frequent, I don’t bother to anonymize…the way I see it, if someone’s making out in public, they’ve already violated their own privacy, so why should I care?

When these involve my students, I may refer to the class as a whole (which I do not consider personally identifiable because the generalization masks individual differences) or anonymize.

In the event I write anything that may reflect poorly on any specific person, other than matters of public record, my policy is to both anonymize and password-protect that post. I will only release the password to people who I cannot reasonably imagine will ever make decisions affecting that person. (For example, a password to such a post about a classmate or colleague will absolutely not be released within the education field or to anyone geographically near them.)

Readers are encouraged to make me aware of any gaps in application of the privacy policy, such as inadequate anonymization.