Terms of Service | Forum Fortress

1. Introduction

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern access to and use of Forum Fortress websites, accounts, APIs, dashboards, and hosted anti-spam services (the Services).

Separately distributed Forum Fortress plugin code is governed by the open-source licence included with that plugin. These Terms govern access to the hosted service when a plugin connects to it; they do not replace or restrict the plugin licence.

By accessing or using the Services, you agree to these Terms.

If you do not agree, do not use the Services.

Marscastle Ltd trading as Forum Fortress

Registered in England and Wales.

Registered Office: Suite 37, 15 Montpellier Road, Torquay TQ1 1DL.

Company Registration No. 15029091.

Information Commissioner's Office Registration No. ZC192565.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority in your jurisdiction if higher, to create an account, subscribe to a paid plan, or use the Services on behalf of an organisation.

If you use the Services on behalf of a forum, business, or other organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to bind that organisation and to install software or connect that forum to Forum Fortress.

Forum owners and administrators are responsible for ensuring they have a lawful basis to submit member, moderator, and visitor data to us. End users of customer forums are not parties to these Terms, but their data may be processed when a customer forum uses the Services.

3. The Service

Forum Fortress provides anti-spam, abuse detection, moderation assistance, reputation scoring, and related protection systems for online communities.

We may add, change, limit, or remove features.

We may offer preview, experimental, free, paid, or invite-only features.

4. Accounts and Access

You are responsible for:

maintaining account security;
protecting API keys and credentials;
activity occurring under your account;
ensuring only authorised persons access your account.

You must notify us promptly of suspected compromise.

We may suspend exposed or abused credentials immediately.

5. Acceptable Use

You may not use the Services to:

break laws or regulations;
process data unlawfully;
harass or target individuals unlawfully;
probe or attack non-public hosted systems maliciously;
overload, scrape, disrupt, or attack our infrastructure;
bypass limits, controls, or billing;
resell access without permission;
submit malware or harmful payloads;
use the Services to support spam operations.

If you run a spam network and are reading this: no.

6. Customer Responsibilities

You are responsible for:

ensuring you have lawful basis to submit data to us;
publishing your own privacy notices where required;
configuring moderation actions appropriately;
monitoring automated outcomes where necessary;
complying with applicable law in your jurisdiction.

You remain responsible for your community, users, and moderation outcomes.

7. Automated Decisions

The Services may score or classify registrations, posts, users, or events as:

allow
block
reject where supported by the connected forum software

Automated classifications may be wrong.

You are responsible for deciding how to apply these outputs within your own systems.

8. Availability

We do not guarantee uninterrupted availability.

Maintenance, upgrades, attacks, provider outages, internet failures, or force majeure events may affect access.

We may suspend or rate-limit services to protect the platform.

9. Preview and trial features

Some features may be offered as previews, experiments, or free trials.

These may be incomplete, unstable, changed without notice, or withdrawn entirely.

Use them at your own risk.

10. Fees and Billing

Current paid plans and prices are shown on the website or agreed separately.

Unless stated otherwise:

fees are payable in advance;
subscriptions renew until cancelled;
late or failed payments may suspend service;
taxes are your responsibility where applicable.

Free plans may include limits, quotas, or reduced features.

11. Refunds

Unless required by law, fees are non-refundable.

However, we may choose to issue goodwill refunds or credits at our discretion.

12. Intellectual Property

Except for plugin code distributed under its own open-source licence, we retain all rights in the hosted Services, branding, private systems, models, documentation, and underlying technology.

You retain rights in your own submitted content and data.

You grant us the limited rights necessary to process submitted data to operate the Services according to your documented instructions. Any separately determined abuse-prevention processing is described in the Privacy Policy and does not grant an unlimited right to use identifiable customer data for unrelated model training or product development.

12A. Open-source plugins

Forum Fortress plugins released with the SPDX identifier GPL-2.0-or-later are free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later. The complete licence supplied with each plugin governs copying, modification, running and redistribution of that code. These Terms do not add restrictions to those GPL rights.

The plugin licence does not provide a Forum Fortress subscription, API credentials, hosted-service capacity, private backend code, datasets, models or infrastructure. Access to those hosted resources remains subject to these Terms, applicable plan limits, authentication, billing and abuse controls.

Forum Fortress names and logos remain trademarks. Forks may accurately describe their origin but must not imply that they are official or endorsed Forum Fortress releases. This clarification does not restrict rights granted by the GPL.

13. Feedback

If you provide ideas, suggestions, bug reports, or feedback, we may use them without restriction or compensation.

Code contributions to an open-source plugin are instead governed by that plugin's contribution guidance and are submitted under the same project licence; contributors retain their copyright and no contributor licence agreement or copyright assignment is required.

14. Privacy

Use of the Services is also governed by our Privacy Policy.

Where we process customer-submitted user data, we typically act as processor and the customer acts as controller.

Where Forum Fortress processes Customer Personal Data on the Customer's behalf, the Forum Fortress Standard Data Processing Addendum forms part of this Agreement on every plan. It can also be managed through the authenticated Privacy section, where a named acceptance record and certificate may be created. Protection, plugin installation, site registration and API use do not depend on completing a separate DPA wizard.

15. Suspension and Termination

We may suspend or terminate access immediately if:

you breach these Terms;
your use creates risk or harm;
payment fails;
we receive legal demands;
abuse of the service occurs;
continued access is commercially or operationally unreasonable.

You may stop using the Services at any time. Suspension or termination of hosted-service access does not terminate rights already granted under a separately distributed plugin's GPL licence.

16. Disclaimers

The Services are provided as is and as available.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we disclaim warranties including:

merchantability;
fitness for a particular purpose;
non-infringement;
uninterrupted service;
error-free operation;
guaranteed detection accuracy.

No spam-detection service can guarantee perfect accuracy.

17. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law:

Forum Fortress will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive, or lost-profit damages.

Our total liability arising from the Services will not exceed:

amounts paid by you in the 12 months before the claim; or
£100 if no fees were paid.

Nothing excludes liability that cannot legally be excluded.

18. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify and hold Forum Fortress harmless from claims arising from:

your misuse of the Services;
unlawful submitted data;
breach of these Terms;
your community moderation decisions;
your violation of third-party rights.

19. Changes to the Service or Terms

We may update these Terms or change the Services.

Continued use after changes take effect means acceptance of the updated Terms.

20. Governing Law

These Terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales.

Courts of England and Wales shall have exclusive jurisdiction unless mandatory law states otherwise.

21. Contact

For legal or service enquiries, contact Forum Fortress via the main website contact form.