Your words stay yours. Everything else is detail.
This is a personal site run by one person. There is no company behind it, no support desk, and no small print designed to catch you out. What follows is the arrangement, written the way I would explain it out loud.
You keep the copyright in anything you write here. You give me permission to publish it. You can ask for it to come down and I will take it down. Be decent, which is covered properly in the code of conduct.
Who owns what
The articles, videos, and dev disaster write ups that I produce are mine. Read them, quote them, link them, argue with them. If you want to republish something whole, ask, and the answer is usually yes.
Comments and stories you send in are yours. You keep the copyright. What you give me is permission, not ownership: permission to publish it on this site, to edit it for length and clarity, to talk about it in a video, and to keep it up while it is still relevant. That permission is not exclusive, so the same story is still yours to tell anywhere else, including somewhere that pays you for it.
The one thing I will not do is change what a story means. Trimming a paragraph is editing. Changing the outcome, the cause, or how it felt is not, and if a story needs that much work I will ask you rather than do it.
Taking something down
Email me and it comes down. You do not need a reason, and I am not going to negotiate about it. This is in the consent you tick when you send a story in, and it is the term I would least want somebody to discover was missing.
Comments you can delete yourself. They become a tombstone rather than disappearing, because a hole in the middle of a thread makes nonsense of the replies underneath it, and those replies belong to other people.
What you promise about a story
Two things, and you tick both before it sends. That it happened to you or you were there for it, and that you have taken out anything identifying your employer, your coworkers, or a customer.
That second one matters more than it looks. This site exists because people can admit to breaking things without it costing them, and the fastest way to end that is one story where somebody works out which outage it was. I check every submission for it as well, but I only know what I can spot from outside.
Do not send me something covered by an agreement you signed. I have no way of knowing, and it is your name on that agreement rather than mine.
What happens to a story after you send it
It goes into a queue only I can see. A title and a web address get drafted for it automatically, then I read it, fix the title if the machine got it wrong, check it for anything identifying, and file it under a severity. Nothing publishes without me reading it first.
If story notifications are on, the site emails you when the story publishes and if it reaches the front page. A story I do not publish does not send a rejection email, so your account remains the complete record of what you sent and where it stands. Publishing anonymously keeps your name and handle off the page and off the source. The badge and notification still follow the account rather than the byline.
I do not have to publish anything, and not publishing a story is not a judgement about you or about the story. Most of the time it is that I already have three that are too similar.
Your account
Sign in with an auth provider, pick a handle, and it is yours until you delete it or I close it. I close accounts for the things listed in the code of conduct and for nothing else. Handles that impersonate somebody, or that are reserved for parts of the site, are not available.
Deleting your account is a button on your account page and it works immediately. What survives it is set out in the privacy page, and you should read that part before you press it rather than after.
Where this site sends you
Links out are links out. Once you are on YouTube, Twitch, GitHub or anywhere else,
their terms apply and mine have stopped. Links people put on their profiles carry
nofollow and are not an endorsement from me.
The part every site has
The site is provided as it is. I run it carefully, but I am one person, and it can be down, wrong, or briefly very strange. Everything published here is somebody's experience rather than professional advice, and a dev disaster is a story about what went wrong rather than instructions for your production database. Read it, learn from it, and make your own call.
If something here causes you a loss, I am sorry, and I cannot be liable for it, to the extent the law where you live lets me say that. Where it does not, the law wins.
Changing these terms
The date is in the sidebar and it only moves when something actually changed. A change never applies backwards to a story you already sent under the old wording.
I wrote this myself, in plain English, because a page nobody can read protects nobody. It has not been through a solicitor yet. If you are reading it as a lawyer and something here is unenforceable or missing, tell me and I will fix it rather than defend it.