Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
Last update: March 26, 2020
Acceptance of the software license
By downloading and/or installing our software on any site you explicitly agree to the terms of its license, GNU General Public License version 3 or, at your choice, any later version published by the Free Software Foundation. A copy of the license is included with our software.
No warranty
Our services are provided as-is, without any warranty whatsoever. The exact terms of our software license can be found in the LICENSE file included in your software. Regarding support services, we can not guarantee the validity or veracity of any provided information or suggestion.
THE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED AS-IS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTY OF AVAILABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE AVAILABILITY, QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF OUR SERVICES IS WITH YOU. SHOULD ANY OF OUR SERVICES PROVE INEFFICIENT OR UNSUITABLE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY ACTIONS TO RECTIFY THE ISSUE.
IN NO EVENT UNLESS REQUIRED BY APPLICABLE LAW TWIST & TWIRL CONSULTING, ITS OWNERS, STAFF, ASSOCIATES OR ANYONE AFFILIATED WITH ITS MAINTENANCE, OPERATION OR HOSTING BE LIABLE TO YOU FOR DAMAGES, INCLUDING ANY GENERAL, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF THE USE OR INABILITY TO USE THE SERVICES (INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO LOSS OF DATA OR DATA BEING RENDERED INACCURATE OR LOSSES SUSTAINED BY YOU OR THIRD PARTIES OR A FAILURE OF OUR PROGRAMS TO OPERATE WITH ANY OTHER PROGRAMS), EVEN IF SUCH PARTY HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
Should the applicable law hold Twist & Twirl Consulting, its owners, or any party affiliated with it liable for damages, the maximum amount of damages acknowledged shall be no higher than 5 Dollars. Shall any dispute arise between Twist & Twirl Consulting and a third party, the only applicable jurisdiction is the State of California, United States of America.
If you do not agree with these Terms, you are not allowed to use our services. Moreover, any use of our services implies the unconditional and immediate acceptance of the aforementioned terms, waiving your legal rights to uphold them. Acting in violation of these Terms of Service constitutes a violation of our copyright and abuse of a computer system.
Support policy
We only provide support through our site's Support section. We will not provide support by any other means including, but not limited to, email, regular mail, telephone, Twitter, Facebook, Skype and so on. If you wish to receive support without using our site's Support section, we reserve the right to request to be paid according to our regular consultancy rates. Our regular consultancy rates are 100 dollars per hour, minimum charge one hour. In case of on-premises support a specific arrangement has to made.
All tickets are answered on a "best effort" basis. Private tickets and severe bug report are given top priority, public tickets are given medium priority. If you have not received any response within 72 hours, please use the Contact Us page to let us know of the issue. If we determine that there is an objective difficulty in providing support to you over our ticket system we will provide you with support over email, in exception of our support policy.
We reserve the right to provide no support for outdated versions of our software, when your server environment does not meet our minimum requirements or when you have modified the core code files shipped with your site's script or our software. We reserve the right to give you a link to our troubleshooting page, documentation and/or previous public tickets if we deem it necessary for providing better support. We will not provide support for issues not related to our software or services. We reserve the right to decline support if the request or the conversation is conducted in a language other than English or when the language barrier makes it impossible to provide meaningful support. We reserve the right to decline support when access to the affected site is denied or objectively impossible. We reserve the right to decline providing support on a case by case basis (even though we do try to help everyone), with or without a reply to your ticket. We assume no responsibility for any issues directly or indirectly caused by our support efforts, as per the "No warrantly" article of this policy. We reserve the right to close support tickets for any reason deemed appropriate. We reserve the right to decline providing support for issues which have to do with using your site's CMS (e.g. Joomla!) or your server / hosting account, but not our software. We reserve the right to close or delete support tickets if the user refuses to follow our instructions and insists on receiving support. We reserve the right to edit or delete tickets or ticket replies. We reserve the right to close or delete tickets and/or block accounts of users who become abusive in their support ticket replies.
Fair use policy
We reserve the right to terminate any account which is suspected in being implicated in unlawful or abusive activity, including –but not limited to– unsolicited mass distribution of our software. Account termination is in the sole discretion of Twist & Twirl Consulting and we reserve the right to not provide any prior warning or further information.
We reserve the right to terminate user accounts (upon fair warning) of users who are submitting the same support requests numerous times to our support ticket system. We reserve the right to block or terminate accounts (upon fair warning) of users who submit an excessive amount of support requests.
Actions for content beyond fair use and account termination policy
If the content you submit to to our site is deemed offensive, inappropriate, defamatory, objectionable or in any other way engages in disruptive behavior, we reserve the right to use your personal information to stop such behavior.
If we believe on reasonable grounds that you are in violation of the laws of the State of California or the United States, we reserve the right to submit your personal information - including the content itself and any other relevant information about you - to the proper authorities, such as law enforcement, your ISP or school email / ISP.
We reserve the right to terminate user accounts when the aforementioned fair use rules are violated. Furthermore, we reserve the right to terminate user accounts if the user is posting unsolicited messages (spam), engaged in sites or services promoting the unauthorised distribution of proprietary or other distributed for-a-fee software (warez), directly promoting or linking to resources promoting indecent or unlawful actions, or in any other way trying to disrupt or diminish the quality of the services offered by this site. Account termination takes place without prior notice and is considered final. We reserve the right to terminate any further user accounts created by the holder of a terminated account, or any other person, business or organisation affiliated with or endorsed by the holder of a terminated account.
Privacy Policy
Summary
Twist & Twirl Consulting is committed to protecting you and your personal information when you are using our services. We want our services to be a safe environment for our users. This Privacy Policy is relevant to our use of any personal information you provide to us during your visit to our site or during your use of our software.
Twist & Twirl Consulting seeks to follow the industry's best practices concerning personal information handling.
The website contains hyperlinks to external resources, hosted and operated by third parties. These parties have their own privacy policies, including cookies, and we urge you to review them carefully. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the handling of your personal information when visiting these external resources; your use of those third party resources and/or websites is your own responsibility.
We also use third-party service and content providers (currently, only website usage analytics data collected by Google, Inc) who may collect their own set of personal information. Since these are third parties, the information collected by them is not governed by this Privacy Statement.
Personal information collected
Whenever you register for our members-only services, for example using our ticket system, we may ask personal information about you. This can consist of such information as your name, e-mail, website address, etc. By entering the information in the fields requested you enable Twist & Twirl Consulting to provide you with the services you select.
We record your IP address as part of the unconditional logging our web server software does whenever anybody accesses our site. The collected IP addresses remain on record for at least a year, but they will be not shared with third parties. Exception to this rule is sharing information with authorities in the case of a suspected or proven breach of our site or other proven misuse of our services.
We record your IP address, HTTP Referer information, username (if applicable), date & time as well as the selected item whenever you are downloading anything from our site. This information is strictly confidential and will not be shared with any third party unless we are requested to do so by law or it is deemed of absolute necessity in order to protect our business (e.g. as a proof of service consumption in the case of a PayPal dispute). We will not sell, lease or in any other way allow any third party to have access to the raw, redacted or aggregated forms of this information, as per the next section of this document.
We record your IP address, HTTP Referer information, and date & time whenever you authorize our software to connect to your third-party account (Constant Contact or eBay). We DO NOT and cannot record your username or password to these third-party services. This information is strictly confidential and will not be shared with any third party unless we are requested to do so by law or it is deemed of absolute necessity in order to protect our business (e.g. as a proof of service consumption in the case of a PayPal dispute). We will not sell, lease or in any other way allow any third party to have access to the raw, redacted or aggregated forms of this information, as per the next section of this document.
Use of collected information
Twist & Twirl Consulting will NOT sell, rent or otherwise willingly transmit any recorded personal information to any third party. Your privacy is important to us and we will not even offer aggregate information resulting from personal information processing to any entity outside Twist and Twirl Consulting. We only use the recorded personal information:
- for service administration purposes, e.g. sending you password reminders, registration confirmations, billing subscription services etc.;
- to contact you regarding new content added on our website, e.g. new forum posts, if you have opted in for this sort of communication;
- to personalize your experience, through the storage of your preferences in cookies and/or our site's database;
- to analyze the use of our website or software and improve its usability;
- IP addresses may be used to identify the location of users, the number of visits from different cities / territories / countries or filter and block inappropriate use.
- dispute chargeback requests
If Twist & Twirl Consulting wishes to use the recorded personal information for other uses, we will notify you beforehand so that you have the chance to opt-out from these new uses.
When we contact you
We only contact you if you have explicitly opted-in for such communication through the use of our services. For example:
- We may contact you if a new post was added to a ticket thread or category you have subscribed to
- We shall contact you regarding if your subscription status has changed or a change is imminent
- We shall contact you to send you a copy of your invoice after a purchase
- We may contact you when you register or modify a user account, request a username/password reminder or reset, or in any other case where you perform an action related to the administration of the information stored in your user account
- We may contact you to email you newsletters or other update notifications if you have opted in to such communication
These forms of contact are conducted by automated software running on our server. You always have the chance to opt-out from such communication. Twist and Twirl Consulting will never send unsolicited email messages ("spam") or allow third parties access to our users and contacts database.
We may also directly contact you - manually sending out emails, as opposed to automatic email sending outlined above - under special circumstances such as:
- Suspecting that your account is compromised by an unauthorized third party
- Before, during or after server-related incidents which may seriously hamper your ability to use our services
- In case you have crossed the line of fair use of our services
- If you have so asked us with an email, ticket, personal message or any other form of contact.
Contact for marketing purposes
We do not send unsolicited email messages for marketing purposes. We may send you newsletters or other update notifications if you have opted in to such communication.
Information sharing with third parties
Information collected by Twist & Twirl Consulting will not be shared in any form with any third parties except as stated in the "Use of collected information" article above.
Notable exception: When you submit an unsolicited support request –that means any kind of support request submitted by any means other than our ticket system– you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy. We reserve the right to publicize parts or the entirety of our communication using any means we deem appropriate.
Privacy policy for minors
If you are considered a minor in your jurisdiction (for example, people under 18 years of age in California) you must get your parent's/guardian's permission before submitting any content or personal information to Twist & Twirl Consulting. If you or your parent/guardian believes beyond doubt that such information have been submitted in violation of the above term, you may submit to us relevant proof so that we can remove the offending information from our website and records.
Duration of personal information retainment
Notwithstanding any aforementioned cases of explicit information removal, your personal information may be stored in our servers for an indefinite period of time, no less than the duration of your account's existence or 1 calendar year, whichever is more.
Updates to our ToS and Privacy Policy
We reserve the right to add, remove or modify any section, article or paragraph of our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy without prior notice. All changes are effective immediately.