Terms and Conditions

These are some general terms and conditions you’re agreeing to if you participate in this website.

Please also refer to our privacy policy page and also please see our Frequently Asked Questions page as we may provide more information there as well.

Shop Terms and Conditions

Our shop is subject to the privacy policy for our website as a whole.

Payment Methods

We accept Visa, Mastercard, Google, and Apple Pay. We use WooCommerce payments as our payment processor, which uses Stripe. We also accept PayPal and Venmo payments, which are processed via PayPal. We do not store your credit card information on our website. That is stored off-site with the payment processor.

We do not accept personal checks or e-checks. Payment must be received before we ship an item. For downloadable items, you can download the item from your account right away once the payment has gone through.

Shipping

Please refer to our shipping page for shipping methods and estimated delivery times.

Shipping is calculated in the cart based on your location and the weight of the item.

Currently, we are offering free shipping on orders over $35 to Washington State residents and orders over $100 to the rest of the continental US.

Refunds and Returns

We accept returns on most physical goods. If we offer downloadable items, we do not accept returns on those. Please refer to our refunds and returns page for information about our returns and refunds policy and how to start a return.

Affiliate Items

Our shop may have affiliate products in it. These items are sold off-site and are subject to the terms and conditions of the site where you purchase the product. Affiliate items will be marked as such.

Registration Terms and Conditions

We allow user registration on our website for the purposes of being able to submit and edit events, submit guest posts, create groups, and track and respond to comments.

However, with great power comes great responsibility. By registering on this website you acknowledge and agree to the following:

• Participating on this website by adding information to your profile, participating in comments, or adding events or guest posts means that you are divulging some personal information. You can control levels of privacy for your user profile on your account page. Currently, new member profiles are not private by default on the member directory but you may change the privacy settings in your account. Customers purchasing items are not shown on the member directory by default — if you want to make sure, check the “customer” box when registering. You can change your privacy level in your profile later if you would like.
• We store user media such as files, photos, videos uploaded to activity, profiles, and groups in an Amazon S3 bucket to save storage space on our web hosting server.
• You will not abuse the messaging system on the website or the groups feature. Members are allowed to create groups, especially ones somewhat related to the topic of this website, but please do not create a bunch of extraneous groups that you do not plan to manage. Groups are for discusion. Please don’t create groups that are entirely intended to sell products or that are misleading and spread false information, hateful, or that purport to offer services that should be left to trained professionals. If you wish to create a photography group to discuss and teach photography skills…great. But please do not try to use a group for offering mental health counseling or try to charge for entry to a private group. Admin on this website reserves the right to join any group and to take down any group.
• We’ve set up moderation systems on our website. You can block a member from a button on the member directory or that member’s profile and you may report groups, activity, or members that violate terms. We cannot keep tabs on everything all of the time and items that get reported enough may be auto-moderated.
• You will refrain from hateful speech (or, rather, writing, in this case), name-calling, flaming, trolling, or otherwise bothersome behavior.
• You acknowledge the privacy policy of this website and that we use some data processors such as Google and Facebook for analytics and advertising purposes.
• The admin and any potential moderators on this website reserve the right to take down any content posted at any time or to block members for abusive behavior.
• You can delete your user account. However, if you are a contributor with paid content, we may restrict your ability to do so as deleting paid content is not allowed.
• You can also add two-factor authentication to your account. Our 2fa system uses the Google Authenticator app. If you lose your device, however, and lose your authentication backup codes we may not be able to help you recover your account.
• New members will start off with “member” status which allows you to submit posts for review, add events linked to your account, create groups, and use profile features. For some event organizers who regularly submit events with the correct details, we may upgrade them to the “event organizer” role where they can publish and edit their own events. For those who donate to support this website, we may update them to “supporter” or “barista” status. And for members who have paid posts approved for publication, we’ll update their role to “contributor.”
• You warrant that you are over 13 years of age.
• Please keep any photos posted in member profiles or albums at the “safe” level.

Profile Completion Requirements

We have implemented a profile completeness system. Members with completed profiles will be marked as “verified.”

You can view your percentage of profile completion from the sidebar of your user profile. At a url like https://www.pnwbeyond.com/member/mynickname/. When it gets to 100% you may dismiss it so it does not show again.

To have a “completed” profile, you are not required to fill in each and every field nor utilize each and every profile widget. A “completed” profile on this site has:

• A display name (this is the name as you have it displayed on the website).
• Real first name
• Last name
• Birthdate (you can make it public if you want, but it’s not by default)
• Bio (just a short bio, the “long bio” field is not required). This will show on your author box if you submit any posts. It can just be a sentence or catchphrase, if you want.
• Upload a profile avatar. A cover image is nice, but not required.
• Address
• Complete the “About Me” widget so you have some information about you on your profile.

We can remove the “verified” badge if we are in doubt and ask for additional verification of identity. We may require this, in some cases, for contributors.

You can check on your percentage of profile completion in the sidebar on your member profile.

Post And Event Submission Terms and Conditions

We encourage community post submissions and contributions from community event organizers.

We prefer to try keeping all terms in one place to avoid discrepancies. We do not charge or pay for event submissions; we may do sponsored, free, or paid posts, depending on the content. Please read the terms and conditions for submitting content on this website, and our Write for Us page.

Photography Terms of Use

Please see this page for our photography terms of use.

Newsletters

We send email newsletters to subscribers who opt in. Here are our terms and what you need to know:

• We no longer use an outside provider (Mailchimp) for our email newsletters. Instead, we maintain our own email newsletter list on our website, so data is not shared with third-party processors.
• Subscribers may unsubscribe by clicking a link in any email newsletter that we send.
• There will also be an “update preferences” link in any email that we send to the newsletter list.
• Some of our newsletters we put together just before we send them out. Some are automatically generated based on your content preferences.
• If you have questions about how frequently we send out our various newsletter options, you can visit our FAQ on the subject.
• We do not sell our newsletter list to third parties. If our website changes hands, our newsletter will go to the new website owners. However, in the case that ever happens, we will send notification to subscribers in advance so they can make a decision about whether to stay subscribed.

Cookies

You may refer to our privacy pages, which list specific cookies used on this website. We’ve currently gone back to using the Google reCaptcha v2 checkbox instead of a honeypot or invisible reCaptcha. The other two options were locking out too many people and not just bots and spammers!