Terms of Service
These are the terms you accept by using FAQ Answers. Last updated: August 2026.
Most of this page is the ordinary machinery any site needs, written as plainly as we can manage. One section is not ordinary, and it is the one about scraping and machine training. We wrote that one twice.
Who these terms cover
Reading a page, subscribing to the newsletter, posting a comment or writing to the desk all count as accepting them. If you do not accept them, close the tab. We will not take it personally.
You need to be old enough to enter a contract where you live, or to have a parent or guardian who agrees for you. Comment accounts require you to be at least 16. The matching age rules for data are in our privacy policy.
Our work is ours
The reporting, the headlines, the question index, the photographs and graphics we commission, and the site as a whole are our copyright or licensed to us. That includes the question-and-answer structure a story is built in, which took years of reading a query log to work out.
What you get is a licence to read, and it is broad in the ways that matter. Open the pages, print them, save them, send somebody a link, quote us in a meeting, hand a story out in a classroom. Nothing here is meant to stop you doing something obviously reasonable with a page you found useful.
Quoting us, and republishing us
Quote a paragraph or two, name FAQ Answers, and link to the story. That needs no permission from anyone here. We are pleased to be quoted, and we credit other outlets the same way.
What needs permission is taking the whole thing. Republishing a story in full, translating and reposting it, pulling our feed into another site, framing our pages inside somebody else’s furniture, or stripping the byline and the date. So does the version where an answer is lifted, reworded a little and published with no link, which is the one we see most. Licensing exists and is not expensive, so write to support@faq-ans.com. Carrying our corrections is a condition of every licence, for the reasons in our corrections policy.
Scraping, and training machines on our answers
You may not crawl this site to build a dataset, and you may not use our content to train, fine-tune, ground or evaluate a machine-learning model without a written licence. We reserve our rights under every text and data mining exception available to us and withhold consent under all of them. Our robots file and response headers say the same in a form a crawler can read. No crawl of this site is consent, and neither is the absence of a rule written for whatever product you shipped this quarter.
We are firm about it for a reason particular to this site. An answer that lands in the first two sentences is the most expensive thing we make. It comes out of a query log, a reporter who called a press office four times to pin down which build dates are affected, and a second editor who sent the draft back because the answer had drifted to paragraph nine. It is also the easiest thing in journalism to swallow whole: short, declarative, stripped of hedging. A model that has eaten ten thousand of our answers and cites none of them takes the traffic, and worse, it removes the reader’s only way of checking whether the answer is any good. When we correct one, the copy stays wrong.
None of that is a complaint about the technology. We use some of it in narrow ways, listed in our editorial standards. This is about permission and payment, both available on request. If you want the archive, ask. If you take it anyway, you get the notice on our DMCA page, and your crawler joins the block list.
Comments and anything else you send us
The comment rules are short. No abuse, no threats, no harassment, nothing illegal to publish, no impersonating a real person, no marketing, and no posting somebody else’s personal information. Telling us an answer is wrong is not a violation, and readers who do it catch a good share of our errors. Telling a writer what should happen to them is.
We moderate, and we can remove a comment or close an account without holding a hearing. What you post stays yours, and by posting it you give us a non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to publish, store, edit for length and legality, and distribute it as part of the story it sits under. Sending us a tip is permission to report on it. Do not send material you are contractually forbidden to share, and if what you have is sensitive, read the contact page before you attach anything.
Links, embeds, and the site as it is
Our stories link out constantly, because a recall notice or a patch note is better read at source. Those sites are not ours. We do not control them, we are not responsible for what they publish after we linked, and a link is not an endorsement. Embedded posts and videos can be edited or deleted by their owners, leaving a hole in a story here that we did not put there.
The site itself is provided as is and as available, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, or uninterrupted and error-free access. That is the legal form of a point we make at more length on our disclaimer page.
Liability, and what you cover
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential or punitive damages, lost profits, lost data or lost opportunity arising from your use of this site or anything you did after reading it. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the greater of what you paid us for access, which is nothing, or the minimum the law requires.
If something you post or send us costs us a claim, you cover it, including reasonable costs and legal fees arising out of your content or your breach of these terms. Nothing here removes consumer rights that cannot be removed by contract, or excludes liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.
Losing access
We can rate-limit, suspend or block access for crawling at volume, attacking or overloading the site, harvesting content or email addresses, abusing other readers, or repeatedly infringing copyright.
Blocking is a technical measure rather than an accusation, and it catches innocent traffic sometimes. If you have been blocked and think you should not have been, write to the address on this page and say what you were doing.
Governing law and disputes
These terms are governed by the law applicable at the publisher’s place of business, and any dispute goes to the courts with jurisdiction there. We are not going to name a more convenient jurisdiction to make the clause look impressive.
Before anybody involves a lawyer, email us. Most complaints written as legal threats turn out to be an argument about one sentence, and one sentence is something we can fix the same day if you are right. If a clause here is unenforceable, the rest stands.
Changes to these terms
We update this page when the law changes or when something happens the terms did not cover. Material changes get the new date, a note at the top, and a line in the newsletter.
Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the new version. If you do not accept it, stop using the site, and tell us which clause is the problem on your way out.
