Terms & Conditions

These terms are the agreement between you and The Blog Story. By creating an account, publishing, commenting or otherwise using the site, you agree to them. If you do not agree, please do not use the service.

1. The service

The Blog Story is a blogging platform for long-form writing. Anyone can read published posts without an account. With an account you can write, publish, comment, follow authors, save posts to a reading list, and manage your own work in the Writer Studio. The service is provided free of charge — there are no paid plans, no subscription fees, and the site takes no payment from you.

2. Your account

• You must meet the minimum age you confirm at registration, and the information you give us must be accurate.
• You must verify your email address before you can publish or comment. Until you do, you can still draft.
• You are responsible for everything that happens under your account and for keeping your password safe. We recommend enabling two-factor authentication in security settings.
• Handles must be available and not on our reserved list. We may reclaim a handle that impersonates someone or misrepresents an official role.
• One person may not run accounts to evade a suspension or to artificially inflate engagement.
• Tell us promptly if you believe someone else has accessed your account. You can revoke sessions yourself from your active sessions.

3. Your content

You keep ownership of everything you create here. Posts, comments, images and other media remain yours.

To be able to run the service, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt for display (for example generating image thumbnails and larger renditions), publish, and distribute your content — but only for the purpose of operating, promoting and improving the platform. The licence lasts as long as the content is on the platform, plus the short period our backups and caches need to expire.

For public posts, this includes making them visible to anyone on the internet, allowing search engines to index them, including them in feeds, search results, tag and archive pages, and in on-site recommendations.

You confirm that:

• you own the content or have the rights to publish it, including every image you upload;
• publishing it does not break the law or infringe anyone's rights; and
• it complies with our Content Policy, Acceptable Use Policy and Community Guidelines.

4. Publishing

• Posts move between draft, scheduled, and published states. You choose whether a post is public, unlisted, or private.
• You can schedule a post for a future time, unpublish it, or move it to trash. Trashed posts are permanently deleted after 30 days.
• We keep a revision history for your posts (the most recent 50) so you can compare and restore earlier versions. When a slug changes, the old address keeps working.
• Some posts pass through editorial review before publication. Editors and administrators may also send a published post back for review.
• New accounts have anti-spam limits for their first few days: a daily cap on how many posts can be published and a cap on outbound links per post. These lift automatically.
• Uploads must be within the allowed types and sizes — images up to 15 MB each, video and audio up to 100 MB each, with a total of 500 MB of storage per account.

5. Comments and community

Comments are threaded and can be edited after posting. An author can turn comments off for a post, and administrators can disable commenting site-wide or allow comments from people without accounts, in which case those comments are held for moderation. Comments may be hidden, marked as spam or removed under our Community Guidelines. You can mute or block other members from your settings.

6. Moderation, suspension and appeals

Anyone can report a post or a comment. Moderators may hide or delete comments, unpublish or trash posts, and warn, suspend or ban accounts. Where we act against your content or account we aim to tell you why, and you can challenge the decision — see your appeals. We publish aggregate moderation statistics in our transparency report.

We may suspend or terminate an account that seriously or repeatedly breaks these terms, or where we are legally required to.

7. Advertising and revenue

The site may display advertising. Writers can opt an individual post into network advertising, which then requires approval before ads appear on it. Advertising is run from the platform's own account — writers do not supply their own — and the split of any advertising revenue is set by the site operator. The platform does not process payments and has no billing, invoicing or payout system; any payment arrangement between the operator and a writer is handled outside the site. Full detail is in our Cookie Policy and Disclaimer.

Authors may add their own support or patron link to their profile, and the operator may add a site-wide support link. These point to third-party sites that we do not run; anything you pay there is between you and that service.

8. Our content and marks

The software, design, layout and branding of the site belong to the operator. You may not copy or reuse them beyond what the law allows, and you may not present the site or its staff as your own.

9. Copyright complaints

If you believe content here infringes your copyright, follow our Copyright & DMCA Policy. Accounts that repeatedly infringe are terminated.

10. Ending your use of the service

You may stop at any time. Deactivating hides your account and can be undone. Requesting deletion starts a 30-day grace period, after which your account and personal data are permanently erased — see the Privacy Policy for exactly what is removed. Both options are in the Danger Zone.

11. Availability and changes to the service

We aim to keep the site available, but we do not guarantee uninterrupted service. We may put the site into maintenance mode, and we may add, change or remove features. If a change materially reduces what you can do, we will try to give reasonable notice.

12. Disclaimers and liability

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”, without warranties of any kind to the extent the law allows. Posts are written by their authors, not by us, and we do not endorse or verify them. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profits, or lost data. Nothing here limits liability that cannot legally be limited. See our Disclaimer.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms; the date at the top shows the current version. Significant changes increase the policy version, and you will be asked to review and accept the updated terms the next time you sign in. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept them.

14. Interpretation

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. Our not enforcing a term on one occasion is not a waiver of it. These terms, together with the policies they link to, are the whole agreement between us about the service.

Contact us

Questions about these terms? Contact us:

• Contact form: send us a message — you will get a reference number to quote in any follow-up.