Wiki author's introduction to the "legal" page of this wiki

Welcome! This is the main admin of KiCadHowTo speaking…

You accessed KiCadHowTo. **You* did it. I wasn't holding a gun to your head. You've already decided to take certain risks.

If you access the "Legal" link in the sidebar, you will go to a lovely long document which "came with" my wiki when I set it up with the Nice People at WikiDot. I'm sure they mean well. I've also used them for a number of years, with only regret to date… 23 October 2011…. (details below).

The document speaks of "the Operators of this site". It says that what it says "applies to all the Operators-maintained web sites…", etc. Yes. Well. (Overlooking the punctuation mistake.) It certainly applies to anything I've created within the wikidot.com domain. I will even give you assurances beyond what is there.

I've run websites for at least a decade… try the WayBack machine on SheepdogSoftware.co.uk… that's one of my older sites. I get about 50,000 hits per month, at October 2011. As of 23 Oct 2011, I've not received notice of any legal actions against me arising from online activities. I hate spam… and I define that rather broadly. I do my emails "by hand", plain text only, with no automated generation of distribution lists. I find that almost anything I am sent by people with marketing departments makes me less inclined to use that company… why would I want to offend my "customers"… not that the "work" I do online is profitable, anyway!

Something to think about: I've tried to explain my attitudes and intents above. But while you are at this site, your activity is visible to the people at WikiDot.com, too. I can't tell you much about what they are doing, other than to repeat the assurance I gave you above: I've been happy using them for years.

The Wikidot.com document speaks of credit cards. I have no intention of asking you for credit card details. If you are asked for that or similar, you are not at my site, or this notice has become dated, and you should check with me before proceeding. I haven't considered asking for that sort of thing in the time I've been on the net. (I do solicit payment by bank-account backed PayPal, in some contexts.)

One last thought: If you don't trust me to be sensible with things I know because of things you've done in visiting this site, do you trust me to tell you the truth if, say, I tell you I won't sell your email address to a spam-bot?

So! Enjoy the "Legal" notice… don't miss the bit about how you should re-read it every time you visit the site!

My regret? I spent about an hour working on the above as a preface to the "Legal" page. As I say, I've used Wikidot for years. At no point was there any suggestion that my work was in vain. I "saved" my work regularly.

I'd just finished, was about to get down to writing something useful for the site… and discovered that all of my work had vanished. Never before had text I'd put on a Wikidot page vanish. While I understand that they don't want the terms and conditions altered… that's why I did a preface, rather than just editing the relevant parts… I don't understand why they let me work for an hour without telling me that my work would vanish. Happily, I know a thing or two, and didn't have to create this page entirely from scratch… but I nearly did!

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