Terms for taking part.
The rules of the road for using this site and joining the community. Written to be read, not to be impressive — and kept short on purpose.
Last updated: 2026-10-15
Note — needs human / legal review
These terms describe how the site is intended to work and are written in plain language by the team behind it. They are not legal advice and have not been reviewed by a lawyer. In particular, the age-eligibility line and the exact wording of the submission licence need a professional review before they can be relied on as binding. If you need certainty, ask us before you rely on a clause.
Use it fairly
Take part honestly, don't abuse the site or the people on it.
You keep your work
Your submissions stay yours; you let us review and, if you choose, publish them.
It's provided as-is
We do our best, but we can't promise the site will always be perfect or available.
By using this website you agree to these terms. If you do not agree with them, please do not use the site.
You must be old enough to enter into an agreement and to use the site lawfully where you live. Submitting a problem to the Problem Commons does not require membership; membership is granted only through the application-and-conversation process described on the membership page.
Open item for review: a specific minimum age has not been set. Until it is, we take it as it comes and will remove anything a guardian asks us to remove.
Taking part here means accepting the community’s Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct (version 2.1). It asks for empathy, respect for differing views, graceful feedback, and taking responsibility for mistakes — and it rules out harassment, personal attacks, and publishing other people’s private information without consent.
Conduct is defined and enforced by the community’s stewards, following the published enforcement ladder: a private correction, then a warning, then a temporary ban, and finally a permanent ban.
Reports can be sent to the enforcement address named in the code of conduct, or to hello@buildforgood.org. Complaints are reviewed and investigated fairly, and the reporter’s privacy is respected.
Read the full code
The complete Code of Conduct, including the enforcement guidelines, lives in the open repository.
CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md →You keep ownership of everything you submit — applications, problems, projects, suggestions, feedback, and messages.
By submitting, you give Build For Good permission to store it, to read it, and to share it internally with the stewards who review it. For a problem you mark Public, and for a project once a person approves it, you also give us permission to publish it on this site. A problem you mark review-only or private is never published or quoted.
Only submit things you have the right to share. Do not include someone else’s private information without their consent.
Open item for review: the wording above should be confirmed by a lawyer as the submission licence, including what happens to material after it is published.
No spam or flooding
Don't automate submissions or work around the site's rate limits.
No abuse of people
Harassment, threats, hate, and targeted cruelty are grounds for removal under the code of conduct.
Nothing unlawful
Don't use the site to break the law or to plan harm.
Don't impersonate
Don't pretend to be someone else, or misrepresent who you are.
Don't attack the site
No attempts to break, overload, or gain unauthorised access to the site or its admin panel.
No scraping for resale
Don't harvest content or personal data for resale or unrelated profiling.
We may remove content, decline a submission, or revoke access where it is used in ways that break these terms or the code of conduct.
The source code in the Build For Good repository is released under the MIT License, which lets you use, copy, modify, and redistribute the software under its terms.
That licence covers the software. It does not grant rights to the “Build For Good” name, the logo, or the community’s written content. Please don’t use them to suggest an affiliation that doesn’t exist.
The site is provided free of charge and on an “as is” basis. We aim to keep it running and accurate, but we cannot promise it will always be available or free of errors.
We may change, pause, or retire parts of the site, and we may update these terms. When we do, we will change the “last updated” date at the top of this page. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated terms.
Some links go to services we do not run — GitHub, for example. Those sites have their own terms and privacy practices, and listing them is not an endorsement.
To the fullest extent the law allows, Build For Good and the people who steward it provide the site and the community without warranties of any kind, and are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of the site — including loss of data, opportunity, or goodwill.
Nothing in these terms is intended to exclude or limit any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited. If a clause here is unenforceable, the rest of the terms still stand.
Open item for review: a jurisdiction and a governing-law clause have deliberately not been invented. A lawyer should set both.