Before we get into the formal stuff, here's the simple version:
GroovyVerse is a community built around creativity, exploration,
friendship, and fun. Real life is stressful enough. We would like
this to be a place where people can relax, build wonderful things,
meet interesting people, and feel at home.
So, a few basic principles:
Be kind.
There's a real human being behind every avatar.
Respect one another.
You don't have to agree with everyone, but harassment,
bullying, threats, and hate aren't welcome here.
Respect creators.
If you didn't create something, make sure you have permission
to use or distribute it.
Be a good neighbor.
Please be thoughtful about scripts, objects, builds, noise,
lag, and the theme of shared areas.
Try to resolve disagreements peacefully.
Drama happens wherever humans gather. We would rather solve
problems than escalate them.
Have fun.
That's a surprisingly important rule.
GroovyVerse is an independently operated virtual-world community.
We aren't trying to become the biggest virtual world on the
Internet. Our goal is to provide a welcoming, peaceful, creative,
and slightly unusual little corner of the metaverse.
GroovyVerse! Your world. Your way.
Now for the more serious stuff.
1. Accepting These Terms
By creating an account, logging into GroovyVerse, or using
GroovyVerse services, you agree to these Terms of Service and any
additional community or service policies we publish.
If you do not agree with these terms, please do not use the service.
These terms apply to GroovyVerse-operated services, including the
virtual world, websites, forums, social features, hosted regions,
land, and other services we may provide.
2. Age Requirement and Your Account
GroovyVerse is an adults-only virtual world. You must be at
least 18 years old to create an account or use GroovyVerse
services.
Although most of GroovyVerse is intended to be friendly, welcoming,
and generally suitable for a broad audience, GroovyVerse is a
community for adults and some regions, venues, events, and
resident-created content may contain adult themes or sexually
explicit material.
By creating an account or accessing GroovyVerse, you confirm that
you are at least 18 years of age.
GroovyVerse may request reasonable proof of age when necessary.
Failure or refusal to provide satisfactory age verification when
requested may result in restricted access or suspension of the
account until age can be verified.
If GroovyVerse requests documentation for age verification, we
will make reasonable efforts to collect and retain only the
information necessary to establish that the user meets our age
requirement. Additional information concerning the handling of
personal information may be provided in our Privacy Policy.
You are responsible for your GroovyVerse account and for keeping
your password and other login information secure.
Please don't share accounts in ways that could compromise their
security, attempt to access another person's account without
permission, impersonate another person for deceptive purposes, or
use accounts to evade a suspension or ban.
You are responsible for activity conducted through your account.
If you believe your account has been compromised, please contact a
GroovyVerse administrator as soon as possible.
3. Community Conduct
GroovyVerse is intended to be a welcoming community.
Harassment, stalking, bullying, threats, intimidation, or
deliberately disruptive behavior are not permitted.
We do not tolerate attacks against people based on characteristics
such as race, ethnicity, nationality, sex, sexual orientation,
gender identity or expression, disability, or religion.
GroovyVerse is LGBTQ+ owned and explicitly LGBTQ+ friendly.
Everyone who treats others with respect is welcome here.
Disagreement is not harassment. People are allowed to have
different opinions, beliefs, cultures, religions, and ways of life.
What matters here is how we treat one another.
Please remember that avatars represent people. Treat the person on
the other side of the screen with the same basic dignity and
consideration you would expect for yourself.
4. Illegal, Dangerous, and Disruptive Activity
You may not use GroovyVerse to engage in activity that violates
applicable law or deliberately harms GroovyVerse, its users, or
other computer systems.
This includes, but is not limited to:
Unauthorized access, hacking, denial-of-service attacks, or
attempts to compromise systems or accounts;
Malicious scripts, viewers, bots, or software;
Griefing or deliberately disrupting regions or services;
Fraud, scams, or deliberately deceptive transactions;
Credible threats of violence;
Distributing unlawful material; and
Using GroovyVerse services to facilitate illegal activity.
Use some common sense here. If something would clearly be
unacceptable outside a virtual world, putting an avatar in front
of it generally doesn't make it acceptable inside one.
5. Intellectual Property and Creator Rights
GroovyVerse is a community of creators, and respecting creators is
extremely important to us.
You retain whatever intellectual-property rights you legally hold
in content you create.
By uploading, importing, selling, giving away, or otherwise
distributing content through GroovyVerse, you represent that you
created that content or have the necessary rights or permission to
use and distribute it.
This applies to objects, meshes, textures, animations, scripts,
sounds, music, photographs, video, written material, and other
creative works.
Content copied or exported from another virtual world is
not automatically legal to redistribute simply because it
can technically be imported into OpenSimulator.
In particular, please do not bring content from Second Life,
Kitely, another OpenSimulator grid, an online marketplace, or any
other source unless its creator or license permits you to do so.
Likewise, an object being marked copyable or transferable by a
virtual world's permissions system does not necessarily mean that
you have permission from its creator to redistribute it elsewhere.
GroovyVerse may remove or disable access to material that we
reasonably believe infringes copyright, licensing terms, or other
intellectual-property rights.
Repeated or deliberate infringement may result in suspension or
termination of an account or service.
When in doubt, ask the creator or don't distribute it.
6. Shops and Commercial Content
Residents may create shops, galleries, markets, and other places
where permitted by the land or region owner.
Anything you sell or distribute must comply with these Terms,
particularly our intellectual-property requirements.
Region or land operators are responsible for taking reasonable
steps to ensure that commercial activity hosted on their property
follows GroovyVerse policies.
GroovyVerse administrators may review shops or publicly distributed
content when necessary to investigate reports of infringement or
other violations.
Our goal isn't to interfere with creators. Quite the opposite—we
want GroovyVerse to be a place where creators feel comfortable
sharing their work.
7. Land, Regions, and Hosted Services
GroovyVerse may provide free or paid parcels, regions, hosting, or
other services.
Please be a good neighbor.
Scripts, objects, bots, physics, excessive resource consumption, or
other content that significantly interferes with the operation of a
region or neighboring regions may be restricted or removed.
Where an area has an established theme or community purpose,
residents should make a reasonable effort to respect it.
We may reclaim or discontinue land or hosted services when:
Required fees remain substantially overdue;
The land or service is being used in violation of these Terms;
Content is causing serious technical problems;
Free land has apparently been abandoned for an extended
period; or
Continued operation would significantly harm GroovyVerse or its
community.
Except where immediate action is necessary for safety, security, or
legal reasons, we will normally try to contact the resident and
resolve the problem before reclaiming land or discontinuing
service.
8. Adult Content
GroovyVerse is an 18+ community, but that does not
mean GroovyVerse as a whole is an adult-themed virtual world.
Most public areas of GroovyVerse are intended to have a generally
PG atmosphere.
However, residents should understand before joining that
adult content does exist within GroovyVerse.
Certain regions, parcels, venues, events, shops, or other
resident-created spaces may contain nudity, sexual themes, explicit
imagery, or other material intended for adults.
Adult content must be kept within appropriately designated Adult
areas. Explicit sexual activity or prominently explicit imagery
should not be displayed in General or Moderate public areas or in
advertising that is readily visible from those areas.
Residents are responsible for respecting region and parcel maturity
designations and for avoiding Adult-designated areas if they do not
wish to encounter this kind of content.
All GroovyVerse users must be 18 years of age or older,
regardless of whether they personally visit Adult areas or
participate in adult activities.
Sexual content involving minors—or avatars, images, characters, or
roleplay presented as minors in a sexual context—is prohibited.
Sexual exploitation imagery involving real minors is absolutely
prohibited and may be reported to appropriate authorities where
required by law.
Region and parcel operators hosting adult venues are responsible
for reasonable moderation of those areas.
Consent matters in virtual spaces too. Sexual harassment, coercion,
stalking, or ignoring another person's clearly expressed boundaries
is not acceptable.
Being an adults-only community does not mean that anything goes.
The same expectations of kindness, consent, respect, and
good-neighbor behavior apply everywhere in GroovyVerse.
9. Privacy and Personal Information
Please remember that virtual worlds are social spaces.
Think carefully before sharing real-world personal information with
other residents. GroovyVerse cannot control what another person may
do with information you voluntarily give them.
Do not publish another person's private real-world information
without their permission.
GroovyVerse may maintain technical information reasonably necessary
to operate and secure its services, such as account information,
connection logs, transaction records, and server logs.
If age verification is required, GroovyVerse will make reasonable
efforts to minimize the personal information collected and retained
for that purpose.
Where applicable, our handling of personal information may also be
described in a separate Privacy Policy.
10. Virtual Goods and Transactions
Virtual objects, land, currency, account balances, and other
virtual-world assets exist as part of the GroovyVerse service.
Please keep backups of important creations whenever practical.
While we make reasonable efforts to operate reliable services,
databases fail, software has bugs, networks go down, inventories
occasionally misbehave, and computers have an uncanny ability to
break at the worst possible moment.
GroovyVerse cannot guarantee that virtual items, inventory, land,
messages, currency balances, or other data will always be available
or recoverable.
Residents are responsible for understanding the terms of
transactions they enter into with other residents. GroovyVerse may
assist when something goes seriously wrong, but we cannot guarantee
or act as a party to every transaction between residents.
11. Service Availability
GroovyVerse is provided on an as-available basis.
We may perform maintenance, restart regions, upgrade software,
change features, address security problems, or temporarily or
permanently discontinue parts of the service.
We do our best to keep things running smoothly, but uninterrupted
or error-free operation cannot be guaranteed.
GroovyVerse is a community project, not a promise that the servers
will survive the heat death of the universe.
12. Moderation and Enforcement
We prefer conversation over punishment.
When a problem occurs, our normal approach is to understand what
happened, communicate with the people involved, and find a
reasonable solution.
Depending on the circumstances, moderation may include:
An informal conversation or request;
A warning;
Removal or disabling of content;
Restrictions on land, regions, accounts, or services;
Temporary suspension; or
Permanent termination in serious or repeated cases.
Serious situations involving safety, illegal activity, deliberate
attacks, exploitation, significant infringement, or significant
harm to the community may require immediate action.
Attempting to evade a restriction, suspension, or ban by creating
another account may result in additional accounts being restricted
or terminated.
GroovyVerse administrators have final responsibility for
interpreting and enforcing these Terms within GroovyVerse.
We will try to exercise that responsibility fairly, consistently,
and with a preference for resolving problems rather than creating
new ones.
13. Your Content and Backups
You are responsible for maintaining backups of content that is
important to you.
GroovyVerse does not claim ownership merely because you upload your
creations to our servers.
However, operating a virtual world necessarily requires our systems
to store, transmit, display, cache, back up, and process resident
content. By placing content on GroovyVerse, you give us permission
to perform those technical operations as necessary to provide the
service.
This permission does not transfer ownership of
your creations to GroovyVerse.
If your account, land, or region is closed, we cannot guarantee
that content associated with it will remain available indefinitely.
14. Changes to These Terms
Virtual worlds evolve, technology changes, and occasionally
somebody invents an entirely new way to cause trouble that nobody
thought to put in the rules.
We may therefore update these Terms from time to time.
When significant changes are made, we will make reasonable efforts
to notify the community through the website, in-world notices, or
another appropriate method.
Continued use of GroovyVerse after updated terms take effect
constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.
15. A Little Perspective
No Terms of Service can anticipate every situation.
When something isn't specifically covered here, we ask residents
to follow the spirit of these rules: respect other people, respect
creators, respect the community, and don't deliberately make
somebody else's day miserable.
GroovyVerse exists because people contribute their imagination,
time, friendship, art, music, code, stories, builds, and wonderfully
strange ideas to it.
We'd much rather spend our time helping you create something
amazing than moderating disputes.
So be kind, make cool stuff, look after one another, and have fun.