TERMS & CONDITIONS
When you join PenStars and use this site, you agree to abide by the following terms and conditions. These rules dictate how we expect you to act and how you can expect us to behave.
Please make sure you read this page properly. You agree to these terms when you use PenStars.
These terms and conditions were correct as of their last update, on 7 April 2017.
We like to keep things simple, so our T&C are quite short. In all situations, common sense is our strongest supporter and, in circumstances not specifically covered here, we do our best to be reasonable and fair.
Throughout these terms and conditions, “we” refers to the PenStars program and site and its owners. “The member”, “you” and “they” refers to a member of the PenStars system. “The system” refers to the PenStars process and back-end system.
- All content submitted to the system remains the property of its original owner. PenStars will not publish or otherwise use the content, except to assess quality and provide feedback.
- Members may submit content for other individuals but they must have the legal right and permission to post the content for the original owner.
- Members must have sufficient funds in their PenStars account to cover the cost of assessing a submission at the time it is submitted.
- Members may cancel submissions provided the member cancels before the submission is assessed for the first time (1st cycle).
- PenStars takes payment when the submission is assessed for the first time (1st cycle). PenStars pays the assessing individual only when the submission completes its life cycle.
- Each submission may go through at most three (3) submission cycles. When the 3rd cycle assessment is complete, the submission’s life cycle is complete.
- After the 1st and 2nd assessments (1st cycle and 2nd cycle), the member has three (3) days to edit and resubmit their submission. If the member does not resubmit before the deadline, the system considers the submission complete and ends the life cycle.
- Members may withdraw from the system at any time without any penalty. The member will immediately lose access to the system upon withdrawal of their membership. They may rejoin the system at any time by contacting us and requesting that we reinstate their membership account, assuming they remain in good standing. Upon reinstatement, they may submit content in the normal way.
- All members must submit appropriate details to withdraw funds. We do not and will never ask for any more information than is absolutely necessary to make payments.
- We are not responsible for incorrect entry of details resulting in lost withdrawals.
- We calculate withdrawable balance as the member’s total deposits minus spending, minus deposit bonuses, minus money retained to pay for submissions submitted but not yet assessed, plus any bonus payments.
- PenStars makes no withdrawal charges, though payment services may levy their own fees. We are not responsible for those costs.
- Deposits to PenStars in currencies other than USD (United States Dollars) may incur conversion fees from PayPal. We are not responsible for those costs. Members who deposit in non-USD currencies may experience lower balances because of those costs. PenStars always credits the full amount received from PayPal after they have levied their fees.
- PenStars provides assessments of submitted content. Any assessment is necessarily opinion. We cannot guarantee that your readers and/or clients will agree with our opinion. Any changes you make to your work are entirely your decision and you accept all the consequences of making those changes. PenStars is in no way liable for other people’s opinions of the final text or any financial losses incurred by making changes suggested by our assessments. In short, you are responsible for your content at all times and we are not.
- We respect the privacy of our members. By signing up for the system, you agree to receive our newsletter, mailshots and important system notifications from us. We may also use your email to contact you if you risk being banned or for other admin-specific messages. We will never pass your information on to third parties without your express consent unless so required by national or international law. You may unsubscribe from our newsletter at any time, without affecting your PenStars membership.
- Any member caught abusing the system in any way, including opening multiple accounts, referring themselves under another name to benefit from referral rewards or opening an account after being banned, will be immediately removed from the system and barred for life. They will forfeit all monies owed to them.
- The PenStars referrals program allows registered members to invite other members and earn whenever those members have content assessed. Only direct referrals count (no multi-tier earnings). Every time one of your referrals completes an assessment, the referrer receives 5% of the scoring cost (rounded down) to their account. The referrer can use these earnings to pay for their own assessments or withdraw them in the usual way.
Privacy Policy
We collect information about you when you:
- visit our website
- join the PenStars program
- post content to our Website
- contact us
We do not hunt out any other information about you unless you give us cause to do so (like hacking or something equally stupid).
Using your information
Collecting your personal information is mostly an act of self-defense on our part: we store details so that we can respond to requests for content removal or (in worst case scenarios) provide data to relevant authorities to hunt down scumbag criminals and the like.
Apart from storing your details so you can log on or we can contact you if there’s a problem, we have no other use for your data. We don’t sell it. We don’t offer it to third parties. We don’t even look at it most days. We just let it sit there in the database, collecting dust.
Analytics information
We run Google Analytics on our sites, so some of your data gets passed to them. It’s nothing individual to you, just stuff like IP address, what pages you hit and so on. All that usual tracking activity that analytics implies.
Admin contact
The only time we will use your details to send you a personal message is if there’s a problem or significant change on the site that you need to know about. You will receive automated messages notifying you of your submissions’ progress but those are generated by a plugin: we don’t see them.
We may use your contact details for occasional marketing. We hate spam, so we won’t throw tons of annoying messages at you or try to sell you loads of useless crap.
Feedback
You can always contact us through the site. We love feedback. And chocolate. We really love chocolate but you can’t send that through the contact form so stick with the feedback for now.
Cookies
We’re based in Europe where there are rules about cookies. In order to comply with these rules, we have to tell you about those scary cookies our site uses, just in case you’re totally paranoid and worry about who’s tracking the fact that you look at bikini photos.
We keep cookies to a minimum. You get one when you login (persistent if you mark the “Remember me” box). And that’s pretty much it.
There are a couple of others that Analytics may generate, but apart from that, there aren’t any cookies you need to worry about.
Well, unless the ads we run use them, of course. But then that’s something you’ll need to handle with them rather than us.
You can find more information about cookies at allaboutcookies.org, youronlinechoices.eu and allrecipes.co.uk.
Disclosing your information
We will only disclose your information to third parties with your express consent or where we are required to do so by law.
Other websites
Our site may contain links to other sites which are outside our control and not covered by this policy. The operators of these sites may collect information from you that will be used by them in accordance with their policies, which may differ from ours (and probably will, since we actually believe in maintaining your privacy).
Accessing your information
To obtain a copy of the information we hold about you, contact us. You won’t have to pay for the information (it’s about five lines of data, seriously). It might take us a few days to respond.
Changes to our policy
We reserve the right to change the policy at any time, without notification.
Contacting us
If you have any queries, please use the contact page or pop an email to admin@penstars.com and give us a day or two to respond.