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Floodgap Terms of Service and Privacy Policy


This document may be changed at any time without notice

Floodgap.com is happy to serve you a wide variety of unique services, sites and information resources on the multiple modalities it offers, including Gopher, HTTP/WWW and others. Floodgap does not run ads on local pages, and all of the services provided to you are funded by the private owners of this site, as well as donations of hardware, network services, and location costs. Please respect the unique and free services it offers by reading and abiding by these strict terms of service, enforceable by immediate and indefinite address blocking and/or reporting your system to your upstream service provider for disconnection.

These terms of service are subject to change without notice. In the below terms, "site" shall indicate any server maintained by Floodgap that offers content, which may be one or multiple physical machines; these terms of service apply equally to any of these systems regardless. Your use of this site indicates your full acceptance of these terms without amendment or limitation. If you do not agree with these terms, please do not use Floodgap services further.

  1. E-mail and contact addresses are provided for your convenience only. Spamming them would be a really dumb idea, as all spam and other unsolicited commercial E-mail sent to these addresses will be traced and reported appropriately.

  2. Except where specifically allowed by license in writing, any information this site may provide is for your private non-commercial use only, and is in no way to be sold, rented, hired out or collected in aggregate form for any method of distribution, private or otherwise, without the express written consent of the administration. This includes but is not limited to: all web page content, scripts and images; all multimedia content; any and all Gopher and other file access services. Material may be copyrighted and may have additional restrictions on its dissemination even if Floodgap permits you to use it.

    If you use software packages offered by Floodgap, regardless of whether they were authored by Floodgap, allowable usage is entirely determined by the license within. This may or may not permit commercial use or redistribution, and you are responsible for complying with the license completely under all circumstances, whether used commercially or otherwise.

  3. Attempting to compromise this site's security (or any of its component servers) in any way is forbidden, and may be illegal in your jurisdiction. Attempts are logged, and may be presented to your network administrator and/or appropriate authorities without warning, even if allegedly committed without malicious intent.

    As a corollary, addresses with defective DNS reverse-lookup may be subject to temporary ban. This is not only because a faulty reverse lookup interferes with internal threat detection, but also because a misconfigured DNS server may generate unacceptable system delays while the site is waiting for a response. Sorry. Please tell your ISP to fix this if you think your DNS is to blame.

  4. The use of web spiders, web site copy agents, and other robots or robot-like activity to download and/or copy this site's content is expressly forbidden, other than specifically permitted robots indexing this site for publicly available search engines and information resources, the list of which is privately and exclusively determined by this site's administrators. Please enjoy this site's content online.

    Be forewarned: Floodgap has taken a very hard line against copy agents due to their irresponsible proliferation. These programs frequently issue rapid-fire requests which increase peak CPU and network load; multiple local copies make proper version control impossible; and furthermore, local copies of copyrighted material may be in violation of the terms Floodgap was granted for its use. Server logs are routinely scanned for robot- and crawler-like activity, and such activity may lead to your network address or netblock being transiently or indefinitely banned from this site without notice. If you are a robot administrator and your robot has been banned from this site, it is either overloading this server, or ignoring directives (such as <META> tags, which are used heavily to cordon off areas). Please correct your software before you contact the administration.

  5. Proxy or gateway services offered by this site, including but not limited to Gopher<->HTTP and Hytelnet, are not designed to offer you any meaningful anonymity. You should not assume that your browsing is anonymous when using these services, and you may be automatically and/or transparently directly connected to the server site without warning. Furthermore, all use of gateway and proxy services is fully logged with client address and requests made for accounting purposes. The use of these proxy or gateway services to defeat, weaken or otherwise circumvent the Internet usage policies of your client network or of the remote server site accessed through the proxy or gateway service is strictly prohibited, and such activity may lead to network address blocks being transiently or indefinitely banned from this site without notice. Robots attempting to crawl proxy services, which are clearly marked with <META> tags to block their indexing, will be banned upon discovery, indefinitely.

  6. Site use is completely at your own risk. No warranty, express or implied, is issued for any content, including but not limited to programs, images and documents, that this site may offer. Furthermore, you are granted no guarantee considering any aspect of said content, including but not limited to the veracity, utility, resemblance to fact, or situational applicability thereof.

    That said, this site does endeavour to present factual information at all times. Please report specific enquiries or concerns to the administration.

  7. Floodgap.com values your privacy. No personal information is requested of you to use this site. Web and gopher server logs are only collected for the purpose of verifying system functionality, contain only the actual request, the user's IP address and user agent, and are erased every 24 hours. No cookies are sent and no session ID is assigned. No permanent record of your activity on Floodgap nor any user profile compiled from your activity on Floodgap is maintained.

    There is no data to provide to any user who requests it under the European Union General Data Protection Regulation as Floodgap lacks the personal information to match a specific user to such data, even within the 24-hour period prior to log erasure. Aggregate counts may be maintained for longer periods for the purpose of historical access statistics, which also contain no individual personally identifiable information and have IP addresses and user agents removed. Such data is not shared with other entities and is not used for marketing or advertising purposes, and similarly cannot be matched to any user who may request it under the EU GDPR.

    There is no data to be deleted on any user who requests it under the California Consumer Privacy Act as Floodgap lacks the personal information to match a specific user to such data, even within the 24-hour period prior to log erasure. Aggregate counts may be maintained for longer periods for the purpose of historical access statistics, which also contain no individual personally identifiable information and have IP addresses and user agents removed. Such data is not shared with other entities and is not used for marketing or advertising purposes, and similarly cannot be matched to any user who may request it to be deleted under the CCPA. Additionally, Floodgap is not subject to the CCPA even if such information were available, as it does not have annual gross revenues in excess of $25 million, and as it neither buys nor sells user information, it therefore necessarily does not buy or sell the personal information of 50,000 or more consumers or households nor does it earn more than half its annual revenue from selling visitors' personal information.

All legal issues regarding the operation of this server shall be adjudicated in accordance with the laws of the State of California, United States of America, where the server and Floodgap are physically located.

Specific questions or concerns may be addressed to the site administration at webmaster@floodgap.com.


Cameron Kaiser