The rules for using All The Capitals, the licence you give when you post something, and what we promise about the data.
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These terms apply to everyone who uses All The Capitals. Reading the site means you accept the parts about accuracy and about our own content. Opening an account means you accept all of it.
You can read, link to, quote and screenshot anything here, and you do not need permission or an account.
You cannot scrape the site at a rate that degrades it for other people. There will be a free dataset download and a documented API precisely so that nobody needs to. Until those exist, ask through the contact page and you will usually get a copy.
You need to be 16 or older. You need a working email address, and a display name nobody else has taken. One person, one account: a second account opened to get around a suspension is itself a breach of these terms.
You are responsible for what is posted from your account.
Entries, ratings, comments and photographs are about places. That is the whole subject. Within it:
Write from your own knowledge or from a source you name. An entry that recommends a restaurant you have never visited is worth nothing to the next reader.
Do not post anything you do not have the right to post. A photograph you did not take, text copied from somewhere else, or a menu scanned out of a guidebook, are all somebody's copyright and none of them are yours to license to us.
Do not post advertising, affiliate links, or paid recommendations dressed as your own opinion. If you have an interest in a place, say so in the entry.
Do not post abuse, harassment, threats, or material that targets a person or a group. Do not post anything that would be illegal where it is read.
Do not post personal information about anyone else, including a private address or a photograph of an identifiable person who has not agreed to it.
Do not use the site to argue a political claim about a contested territory. The site's position is set out on the disputed territories page: it takes none, and it publishes what its sources record. Corrections to the data are welcome and go through the same review as any other correction.
This section matters more than the rest, and it cannot be changed later for things already posted, so it is worth reading slowly.
When you post text or upload a photograph, you keep your copyright. You grant two licences at the moment you post.
To everyone, including us, you license the contribution under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. That is the licence the site publishes your contribution under, and it is why your display name appears beside it. Anyone may reuse your words or your photograph if they credit you and pass on the same licence.
To All The Capitals, you also grant a separate, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable and sublicensable licence to use, copy, adapt, publish, distribute and commercially exploit the contribution, without the share-alike condition. This second licence is what allows the site to offer a commercial data licence to a business whose own product cannot be share-alike, and to sell prints, without any of that affecting the CC BY-SA licence you granted to everybody else. You keep your copyright and you keep the right to do anything you like with your own work.
You confirm, when you post, that the work is yours to license on both of those terms.
Photographs uploaded here may be offered as printed posters. If a print of your photograph is sold, you get a share of the net margin on it, and your name is printed on it.
No print will be offered for sale before the share is published on the shop page, in a figure, with how it is calculated. Nothing is sold under this clause until that page exists.
You can withdraw a photograph from print sales at any time through the contact page, and it will be withdrawn from the shop within seven days. That does not undo sales already made, and it does not revoke the licences above, which is what irrevocable means.
Contributions from accounts less than seven days old are held for review before they appear, as are contributions that trip the word filter, contain more than one link, or come from an account that has posted more than ten entries in a day. Holding is not an accusation. It is a queue.
Anyone can report an entry, comment, photograph or profile. Three open reports on the same thing hold it automatically until a moderator looks. Who reported something is visible to moderators only.
A moderator can hide a contribution, which leaves it visible to you with the reason; remove it, which leaves it in the database and visible to nobody; restore it; or suspend an account until a date. You are told by email when something of yours is hidden or removed, and why.
Nothing is deleted outright except on a verified copyright or legal request, and then a record that it existed and was removed is kept.
If you think a moderation decision is wrong, reply to the email or use the contact page. Decisions are made by a person and a person will reconsider.
A suspension runs to a date. Deleting your account during one does not end it: a record that the address was suspended is kept so that the same address cannot re-register until the suspension expires, and the privacy notice describes exactly what that record holds and how long it lasts.
The data here is assembled from open sources, cross-checked, and corrected when someone tells us it is wrong. It is not authoritative, it is not a legal record, and it must not be used for navigation, for border determination, for emergency response, or for anything where being wrong has a cost.
We do not warrant that it is accurate, complete or current, and we are not liable for a loss that follows from relying on it. Nothing in this paragraph limits liability that cannot be limited in law, including for death, personal injury or fraud.
The site may be unavailable at any time and for any reason. It is one person's project on a small budget.
The text of the site's own pages, the design, the palette system and the code are ours, and reuse of them needs permission. The reference dataset is different: it is published under CC BY 4.0 and you may use it commercially, with attribution.
Everything drawn from other sources carries that source's licence, and the attribution page lists all of it.
If something here infringes your copyright, the takedown notice sets out what to send and what happens next.
You can delete your account whenever you like, from the account page. Your contributions stay published under the licences you granted, with your name replaced by "deleted user", because CC BY-SA cannot be withdrawn from people who already relied on it.
We can close an account that breaks these terms.
The date at the top is when they last changed. A change that affects your rights, including anything in the licence section, is announced by email to signed-in accounts before it takes effect, and never applies to contributions already made.