Sponsorship Terms of Service

International Web Development Network (IWDN) sponsorship opportunities are open to anyone wishing to sponsor the ongoing growth of the IWDN public and private online forums and discussion groups. For-profit businesses, non-profit businesses, individuals and other discussion groups are welcome to become sponsors.

Sponsorship of IWDN does not in any way guarantee indemnity from public discussions on IWDN that are critical in nature, negative or potentially damaging to the sponsor's business. IWDN moderators and administrators will make every attempt to moderate discussions with fairness to all discussion participants as their greatest objective. This is the same objective to which the moderators and administrators aspire regarding all discussions, and no favorable consideration will be given to sponsors. As IWDN is an open, moderated network, it is not responsible for any activities that may be deemed libelous, and IWDN will cooperate when called upon to assist in legal actions between two or more forum participants, without regard to any participant's financial support of IWDN.

IWDN will never disclose forum member-specific information to sponsors without active, direct agreement from any individual registered on the forums to whom such a query might apply. This means sponsors may not ask whether certain individuals were exposed to their sponsorship messages, and IWDN will not release information that links individuals to sponsorship clicks, most commonly tracked via IP addresses.

IWDN will make statistics regarding general forum use - number of unique visitors, number of page views, etc. - freely available to sponsors and the general public upon request. IWDN will also track the number of times a sponsor's message is displayed and will track the number of times a sponsorship message is clicked. This information will be kept on a per calendar month basis or portion thereof.

IWDN offers its sponsorships at a flat rate per month, regardless of the ebb and flow in site traffic. No minimums are guaranteed for page views, impressions, clicks or any other measure of forum activity. Page rank is not guaranteed to maintain a certain level. Again, current statistics are available for individual sponsors to track and measure as they see fit.

The value in sponsoring IWDN is expressed in a few different ways. First, it is expected some value will come from persistent exposure of a sponsor's linked name and marketing message to forum visitors. Second, it is expected some value will come from persistent exposure to search engines, leveraging IWDN's constantly fluctuating popularity in search results and page rank. Third, it is implied that a sponsor recognizes the impact that the advice and discussions have had on his or her business or abilities and to an extent is returning that value to IWDN. Fourth, it is implied that a sponsor recognizes the value that IWDN brings to the development community in general and is honoring that value with his or her sponsorship of the discussions.

All sponsorship payments are final and non-refundable. If serious uptime interruptions occur during the course of a calendar month, IWDN administrators will consider giving partial or full refunds, or crediting sponsors with additional sponsorship time. This is fully at the discretion of IWDN administrators, who will take great pains to ensure such matters are handled fairly and to the satisfaction of sponsors without undue negative impact on IWDN. A serious interruption is defined as unplanned downtime exceeding 24 hours total during the course of a month, either in one major outage or multiple, shorter outages. Planned outages, such as to upgrade servers, implement new applications or make modifications requiring brief unavailability of the database will not count toward this total, and it is inferred that such activities will have a positive impact on the forums and therefore on the sponsors as well. Regardless, planned outages will be very brief and will likely go unnoticed.

Sponsors may cancel their sponsorships at any time. If a sponsor chooses to remove his or her message, IWDN is not obligated to give a partial or full refund on any time purchased. Otherwise, the sponsorship will remain in position until the remaining period of time elapses, at which point it will be removed from the forums.

IWDN may cancel a sponsor's message at any time without notice. IWDN administrators have carefully chosen to refer to messages as sponsorship messages and not advertisements. This is because sponsors of IWDN are implying their endorsement of the forums from a professional, ethical and/or personal perspective. Conversely, this relationship implies IWDN acceptance of the sponsor's endorsement. Circumstances may arise where IWDN is unable to accept a relationship of this nature with a sponsor and reserves the right to end the relationship if circumstances cannot be resolved. These circumstances include (but are not limited to) verifiable illegal activities on the part of the sponsor, practices IWDN deems to be plainly unethical or repugnant and links/messages that in any way break general forum rules. When this occurs, IWDN will issue a prorated refund for paid sponsorship time gone unused.

All aspects of IWDN sponsorships management are handled by Equentity LLC and its IWDN representatives, Jamie Harrop, Paul Hirsch and Paul Riddick. Equentity LLC pledges not to compete with sponsors. It will restrict itself entirely from sponsoring a forum or adding itself to the forum rotation, regardless of availability of space. Subsidiaries of Equentity LLC are likewise pledged.