Acceptable Use Policy

Prohibited content

Don’t publish tales that contain:

• Illegal content: anything unlawful to publish or possess under the law of England and Wales, or that facilitates illegal activity.
• Malware or phishing: malicious code intended for harm, phishing pages or lures, or links designed to compromise anyone’s device or accounts.
• Other people’s secrets: credentials, API keys, tokens, private keys or other secrets that don’t belong to you. (Redact your own before publishing too. The CLI preview exists for a reason. But publishing someone else’s is a policy breach.)
• Personal data without consent: doxxing, or personal data about others that you have no right to share.
• Harassment: content that harasses, threatens, or incites hatred or violence against anyone.
• Infringing material: content that infringes copyright, trade marks or other rights, or third-party confidential information you’re not permitted to share.
• Spam and SEO abuse: content published to manipulate search rankings, spread unsolicited advertising, or flood the service.

Impersonation and brand misuse

A tale is designed to look like it came from you, and a reader is meant to trust it. That only works if nobody abuses it. So:

• Don’t publish as a person, company or organisation you don’t represent. Your tales must be honestly attributed.
• Don’t use a logo, name, colours or other brand assets you have no right to use. Applying a brand to your tales is a claim that it’s yours or that you’re authorised to use it. Extracting a brand from a website doesn’t make it yours.
• Don’t use tales to defraud or mislead a reader: no fake invoices, fake support pages, fake security notices, or anything designed to extract money, credentials or data under a false identity.
• Don’t fabricate evidence. A tale’s evidence box is whatever its author put there. Inventing sources, quotes or results to make a tale more convincing is a breach of this policy.

Prohibited behaviour

Don’t:

• Use taleseal as a general-purpose pastebin or file host at abusive scale. Tales are pages composed for their readers; bulk-dumping unrelated data or files isn’t what the service is for.
• Enumerate or scrape taleseal URLs. Tales are unlisted by design: attempting to guess, brute-force, crawl or otherwise discover URLs you weren’t given is a serious breach.
• Circumvent rate limits or other technical restrictions, including by rotating accounts or keys.
• Run security testing without permission. If you want to test taleseal’s security, or you’ve found a vulnerability, check our security.txt (/.well-known/security.txt) and contact us first. Don’t test against live user data. We won’t pursue legal action against good-faith security research that follows this policy and security.txt.
• Share or use API keys or accounts that aren’t yours, or help anyone else breach this policy or the Terms of Service.

Enforcement

We enforce this policy at our discretion. Depending on severity, we may:

• warn you;
• remove or disable access to content;
• suspend your account or API keys; or
• ban you permanently.

For severe cases (illegal content, malware, credential dumps, doxxing, impersonation, active attacks) we act immediately and without warning, and we may report matters to law enforcement where appropriate. For less severe cases we’ll usually warn you first. Removal by us works like any other removal: the URL stops serving the content.

Reporting

To report content or behaviour that breaks this policy, email [email protected] with the URL and a short description of the problem, or use the “report this page” link in the footer of any tale. Anyone can report, not just account holders. We review every report.

If a tale is impersonating you or your organisation, say so and we’ll treat it as urgent.

If you think we got it wrong

If we remove your content or suspend your account and you think we got it wrong, reply to the notice we sent (or email [email protected]) and a human will review it. The same goes the other way: if you reported something and disagree with how we handled it, tell us and we’ll look again.