Acceptable Use and Community Rules

These rules are part of the Terms of Service (the "Terms") for SoupFestivals, run by Latent Software LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company, 30 N Gould St, Ste N, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA ("we", "us", "our"). They apply to everyone who uses the Service, with or without an account, and to every feature of it, including listings, profiles, the soup passport, guest lists, tips, claims, organizer and business profiles, reviews, ratings, comments, messages and email alerts, wherever we offer them. Words that these rules do not define, such as "Service", "listing", "Business User", "Organizer" and "Listed Business", have the meaning in the Terms. If these rules and the Terms conflict, the Terms control. The version of these rules that forms part of your agreement is the one made available when you accepted the Terms, as later changed under Section 21.3 of the Terms. When you create an account, the sign-up agreement covers these rules as well as the Terms, and we record the version of each (Section 22.1 of the Terms).

SoupFestivals is a place to find soup, keep a soup passport and meet other people who love it. Most of these rules come down to three things: tell the truth, respect other people, and leave the site and its data alone.

Except where the law requires it, we are not obliged to review content before or after it appears, and, where Article 8 of the EU Digital Services Act or a similar rule applies, we have no general obligation to monitor it. These rules say what you may not do. They do not create a duty for us to find, prevent or fix a breach.

1. Tell the truth

You must not:

send a tip that you know is false or misleading, such as a festival that does not exist, made-up dates, places or prices, or a link that does not support what you say;
send a claim for a listing that you are not connected to, or misstate how you are connected to it or what authority you have;
publish or send listing information, menus, prices, offers, opening hours or other details that you know are false or misleading;
mark "I'm going" or "I was there" to mislead other people, for example to make a festival look busier than it is or to make it look like someone was somewhere they were not;
use badges, stamps, guest lists or reviews to suggest that we, an organizer, a business or a municipality endorse you or vouch for you; or
tell people that an approved claim, or a profile that you manage, means that we verified who runs a festival or a business, or that it gives you rights over a listing. It does neither (see the Terms).

Stamps and "I'm going" are self-reported. Nothing checks them. That is why we rely on you to use them honestly.

2. Be who you are

You must not impersonate any person, organizer, festival commission, association, parish, school, youth group, municipality, business or brand. That includes:

picking a username, display name, photo or bio that makes people think you are someone you are not;
using an organization account, a claim or a business profile to suggest that you speak for an organization or a business that you do not represent. An organization account names an organization. It does not give it any verified status; and
creating accounts by automated means or with false details.

3. Your profile: username, name, photo, home town and bio

Your public profile at soupfestivals.com/@username shows what you choose to put there. Whatever you put there, and anything else that you post on the Service, must not:

contain hate speech, or attack or demean people for who they are;
harass, threaten or bully anyone;
contain sexual content, nudity, or graphic violence;
contain anything illegal, or encourage illegal acts;
contain another person's personal data, such as their phone number, home address, email or ID documents;
contain spam or unrelated advertising or promotion. Organizers and businesses may provide accurate information and relevant links about their own event or business through the features intended for that purpose;
use a trademark, a festival's name, a business's name or a municipality's name that you do not own or may not use, in a way that misleads people; or
infringe someone else's copyright, privacy or other rights.

Photos. Use a photo of yourself, or an image you have the right to use. Do not upload a photo of another person without their permission. Do not upload photos of children, including your own (see Section 7). We may crop, resize or convert photos that you upload, but you are still responsible for what the picture shows.

Usernames. A username is not property. We may rename or take back a username that breaks these rules, that impersonates someone, that uses a name or brand that is not yours, that is offensive, or that reads as the site itself speaking. We may also take back usernames of inactive accounts. We may do this without asking you first.

4. Respect other people on guest lists and profiles

Festival pages show "Who's going" and "Who was there" for people with public profiles. Those lists are there so soup lovers can share a hobby. They are not a way to find or follow people.

You must not:

use profiles, guest lists or "I'm going" to track, follow, stalk, locate or turn up uninvited to meet a person;
collect, combine or publish information about a person from their profile or from guest lists (doxxing), here or anywhere else;
contact people you found on SoupFestivals to harass them, to sell to them, or for any reason they have not welcomed;
use other users' profiles, reviews or attendance for any commercial purpose, such as marketing lists, lead generation or profiling; or
try to find out who is behind a private profile, or who is counted as "more with private profiles".

Think before you mark "I'm going" on a public profile. It tells people where you plan to be. When you set up a profile, it is public unless you switch "Show my profile publicly" off before saving; you can switch it off at any time when you edit your profile, which hides your profile and takes you off guest lists.

5. Reviews, ratings and comments

Where the Service lets you post reviews, ratings, comments or questions:

review only what you experienced yourself, and say what you honestly think;
do not post a fake review or rating, or post one for someone else;
do not post a review or a rating in exchange for payment, a discount, a gift, a free meal or another benefit;
do not review your own festival or business, one that you work for or are related to, or one that you compete with;
do not post the same review more than once, or post reviews from more than one account;
do not use a review to threaten a business or an organizer, or to demand something from them; and
keep to the subject: a review is about the festival, the event, the place or the food, not a place to attack individuals by name.

We do not verify that reviews come from people who went to the festival or used the business, unless we say so on the review. We do not remove an honest review only because it is negative.

6. Messages and contact

Where the Service lets you send messages, send only messages that the other person would welcome. Do not use messages to sell, to spam, to harass, to ask for money, payment details or passwords, or to move someone to another service in order to defraud them. If someone asks you to stop contacting them, stop.

7. Children and young people

Do not post images or personal data of anyone under 18 on the Service, even with consent, including in a profile, a review, a comment, a listing or a poster that you send us.
If you organize or act for an event or an organization that involves children or young people, such as a Scouts or Guides group, a school or a youth group, you alone are responsible for safeguarding, for supervision, and for obtaining the consent of parents or guardians for their participation and for any images or data of them. We do not check that you have.
Do not use the Service to contact, approach or arrange to meet a child or a young person.
Accounts and email-alert subscriptions are for adults only. Do not create an account for a child or subscribe a child's email address; a parent or guardian may subscribe to alerts using their own email address.

If you think that a child is at risk, contact the local police or child-protection services first, and then tell us (Section 14).

8. Rules for Business Users

If you are an Organizer or a Listed Business, or act for one, in addition to the rest of these rules you must not:

act on the Service for an organization or a business unless you are an adult authorized to bind it;
publish or send information that is inaccurate, out of date or misleading, or fail to correct it when you learn that it is wrong;
make misleading claims, including about prices, offers, ingredients, origin, awards, certifications, or any endorsement by us;
write, buy, commission or reward reviews or ratings, or ask people to review you in exchange for anything;
ask only satisfied customers for reviews, or discourage unhappy customers from posting them (review gating);
ask someone to remove or change an honest review in exchange for a refund, a discount or anything else, or threaten someone who posted one;
post fake reviews of a competitor, or report a competitor's honest content as abusive;
try to influence how listings are ranked or shown by any means other than keeping your listing accurate and complete, for example by using many accounts, fake attendance or misleading names; or
use the personal data of people who use the Service for any purpose that they did not agree to.

You are also responsible for your event or business, including permits, licences, food safety, allergen information and labelling, insurance and compliance with the law, as the Terms explain.

9. No spam or promotion

You must not use tips, claims, profiles, reviews, comments, messages or any other part of the Service to send spam or advertising, to promote a business, a page or an account that has nothing to do with the listing or the conversation, or to send the same tip, claim or message again and again. Organizers and businesses may tell us about their own festival or business. That is what tips, claims and business profiles are for.

10. Leave the site and its data alone

You must not, and must not help anyone else to:

scrape, crawl, harvest or bulk-download any part of the Service, including listings, recipes, articles, profiles, guest lists, reviews, posters and photos, beyond normal browsing by a person;
collect profiles, guest lists or reviews in bulk, or build a database or a list of users;
use the Service or its content to train, fine-tune or test a machine-learning or AI model, or to build a dataset for one. We reserve all text and data mining rights in the Service, including under Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790;
use bots, scripts or other automated means to create accounts, send tips, claims, reviews or messages, mark visits, sign in, or subscribe email addresses to alerts;
get around, or try to get around, our bot protection, a rate limit, a block, a suspension or a ban, including by opening new accounts;
subscribe someone else's email address to alerts without their permission;
reverse engineer the Service, except where the law allows it despite this rule;
access, or try to access, another person's account or data, or any part of our systems that is not meant for you;
probe, scan or test the security of the Service, or overload or disrupt it; or
upload or send malware or any code meant to harm the Service or its users.

These rules do not limit any permission that a work's own public licence, or mandatory law, gives you for that work. Such a permission does not authorize you to interfere with the Service or to collect the personal data of its users, which this Section still forbids.

Found a security problem? Tell us at [email protected] with enough detail for us to reproduce it. Please do not access other people's data, do not disrupt the Service, and give us a reasonable time to fix the problem before you tell anyone else. Reporting in good faith this way does not by itself give you permission to test our systems.

11. Obey the law

You must not use the Service for anything illegal, or to share content that is illegal, defamatory, threatening, or that infringes another person's intellectual property or privacy. Copyright, trademark and personal data complaints are handled as our Copyright, Takedowns and Removals page explains.

12. How we enforce these rules

We may, but are not obliged to, act on a breach of these rules. We may remove or hide content, decline or remove a tip or a review, withdraw an approved claim or access to manage a listing, rename or take back a username, hide a profile or take it off guest lists, limit features, or suspend or close an account. We choose what fits the case.
Within the scope of the rules that provide it, such as Article 8 of the EU Digital Services Act, we have no general obligation to monitor the Service, and nothing in these rules creates one. Any monitoring or action that we take remains subject to the duties that the law places on us.
We may use automated and human means to detect, review and act on content, and to detect and act on abuse, spam and security threats. Automated protective measures may temporarily restrict access. Content-moderation complaints receive the human supervision required by applicable law.
If we do not act in a case, that does not mean we approve of what happened, and it does not stop us from acting later or in another case.
We may act on information that we reasonably believe, without first proving a breach. We may act without warning where we think there is a risk to a person, to the Service or to us, or where the law requires it.
Where the law requires it, including the EU Digital Services Act and, for Business Users, Regulation (EU) 2019/1150, we tell the person affected what we did and why (a "statement of reasons", whose contents Section 14.5 of the Terms describes), and how they can challenge it.
We may keep records of a breach, and share them with the people affected and with the authorities, where the law requires or allows it. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle that data.
Suspension and closing of accounts are also governed by the Terms. If you are a consumer, nothing in these rules takes away the rights that the law gives you.
To the fullest extent the law allows, no action that we take or decline to take under these rules makes us liable to you or to anyone else.

13. Disagree with a decision?

If we removed your content, renamed your username, hid your profile or limited your account, and you think we got it wrong, reply to the email in which we told you, or write to [email protected]. Tell us why, and add anything that helps us see it differently. We will look at it again, with the human supervision required by applicable law. Where Article 20 of the Digital Services Act applies, the complaint process in Section 14.5 of the Terms is open to affected users and to people who sent a notice. This does not affect any other right that the law gives you, such as going to court. Business Users can also use the complaint process in Section 8.11 of the Terms.

14. How to report a problem

To report a profile, a username, a photo, a review, a comment, a message, a guest list entry, a listing or anything else that breaks these rules or the law, email [email protected] with:

the exact web address (URL) of the page, such as soupfestivals.com/@username or the listing page;
what is wrong, and why you think it breaks these rules or the law; and
your name and email address, so we can reply.

If you are reporting illegal content under the EU Digital Services Act, our Copyright, Takedowns and Removals page lists what a notice must contain. Copyright notices go to our designated copyright agent, as that page explains.

If someone is in immediate danger, contact the local police or emergency services first. We are not an emergency service.

We look at clear and specific reports with care and act where we decide action is warranted. We do not commit to any fixed response time. Sending a report you know is false can make you liable for it.

15. Changes

We may change these rules only as Section 21.3 of the Terms says for changes to the Terms, including its notice for material changes. The "Last updated" date at the top shows when they last changed.

We write these documents in English, and the English text governs. We may provide translations. Where the law that protects you requires a version in your language to prevail, or requires these documents to be interpreted in your favour, that law applies. Mandatory consumer and data-protection law determines any language or interpretation requirement; a language-precedence provision does not restrict those rights. Before accepting the Terms, you can read and keep these documents.

16. Contact

Latent Software LLC
30 N Gould St, Ste N, Sheridan, WY 82801, USA

Support: [email protected]
Reports and legal notices: [email protected]
Privacy: [email protected]