Please Note – The ‘blog owner’ is the person who requested the blog.
Blogs.salford.ac.uk is a tool provided by the University of Salford to share information and promote discussion and collaboration on a range of topics. The tool must not be used to deliberately damage the reputation of the University of Salford nor as a platform to launch complaints against the University.
By using blogs.salford.ac.uk you are agreeing to abide at all times by the University’s IT Regulations, including the IT Acceptable Use Policy and the Terms and Conditions set out below.
Acceptance of terms
- Blog owners commit to posting regularly (minimum once a fortnight). A few interesting articles do not make a blog by themselves (though they may be posts on a blog). If you’re not regularly updating your blog, we’ll ask you to archive it
- Blog owners must ensure content is distinct and unique. In particular, don’t overlap with content elsewhere on salford.ac.uk, or for which there is an existing format (e.g. course-finder, news article or policy)
- Blog content expresses the personal views of the blog owner, who is responsible for the content of the blog. In cases where blogs are used to express an official university view, this should be clearly indicated in the content and the blog owner should have sought approval from the relevant authorities before publication
- Intellectual property rights must be clearly established between all parties at the outset of any collaborative project that may create intellectual property
- The default setting for blogs.salford.ac.uk is that all material will be publicly available and therefore searchable
- You agree to fully indemnify and hold harmless the University of Salford against any liabilities, claims, costs, loss (including consequential loss) or damage incurred as a result of any material you post, or as a result of any breach by you of these Terms of use
- Any uploaded media files such as sound, image, and video, should be necessary and relevant to the theme of the blog post and supported by appropriate contextual text.
You agree not to use the blog to
- Deliberately damage the reputation of the University of Salford or to jeopardise its legitimate business relationships
- Air personal grievances or make complaints about the University of Salford
- Post any content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, profane, vulgar, obscene, invasive of another person’s privacy, hateful, fraudulent, discriminatory, provokes or encourages violence or is racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable
- Impersonate any person or entity or misrepresent your relationship with any person or entity
- Post any content that would infringe any UK laws
- Generate illegal, obscene or offensive content (including breach of copyright), or bring illegal, obscene or offensive material to the attention of other community members
- Post content that is defamatory. Content can be defamatory if it: “tends to lower a person in the estimation of right thinking members of society generally; or which tends to make them shun or avoid that person”
- Disclose confidential information or sensitive personal data
- Infringe upon any copyright, trademark, trade secret or patent of any third party. (If you quote or excerpt someone’s content, it is your responsibility to provide proper attribution to the original author.)
- Use editorial content that has been commissioned and paid for by a third party, (either cash or goods in barter), and/or contains paid advertising links and/or SPAM or “Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages.” We define SPAM as anything that qualifies as nonsense unrelated to the discussion
- Post any material that contains software viruses or any other computer code, files or programs designed to interrupt, damage, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer software or hardware or telecommunications equipment
- Use the tool to conduct personal business or for any commercial purpose not authorised by the University of Salford.
Moderation guidelines
It is the responsibility of the blog owner (and their department if it is an Official blog) to regularly moderate posts/comments.
These blog rules apply to any media material such as text, images, video as well as your avatar image and signatures. We will not publish or moderate your posts/comments if they:
- Attack individuals and do not offer constructive discussion point
- Contain sexist, homophobic, racist, abusive, or can be otherwise offensive to some
- Contain links to content that does not add anything to the point being discussed
- Advertisement of your services or products
- Contain expletives
- Include contact details such as website addresses, email or phone numbers
Media support
Images and documents can be uploaded through the WordPress media centre. Individual files have a limit of 1500kb and allowed file types are:
jpg, jpeg, png, gif, mp3 and pdf
Videos should to be hosted on external websites like YouTube or Vimeo and embedded into the post.
We currently have example code to allow the embedding of the following:
youtube, vimeo, soundcloud, slideshare, instagram, scribd, geograph and tweets.
Disaster recovery
In the event of Server hardware failure ITS will be responsible for a system restore and the risk of lost items could be incurred. No out of hours support will be provided.
Blog removal
Failure to follow these terms and conditions and taking into account frequency and severity of any breaches of the guidelines, may result in your blogging account being suspended or deleted.
The University reserves the right to take down any content that it deems to breach any of the above and misuse of this service may result in the suspension of accounts and disciplinary action being taken against staff and students and/or litigation against any user.
Please note that these Terms of Use may be updated without notice at any time, so please ensure you review them regularly.
Contact us
If you find any errors or would like to raise a concern about content on blogs.salford.ac.uk, please contact the digitalteam@salford.ac.uk.