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Terms of Service

Last updated: 13 March 2026

These terms govern your use of A Walled Garden. By creating an account or using the service, you agree to be bound by them. If you do not agree, please do not use the service.

1. What A Walled Garden is

A Walled Garden is a platform for curating and sharing cultural recommendations — books, essays, poems, quotes, and other works. Users create personal pages ("gardens") to organise and display the things they value. The service is provided free of charge.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 16 years old to use A Walled Garden. By creating an account, you confirm that you meet this requirement. If we become aware that a user is under 16, we will delete their account.

3. Your account

You are responsible for maintaining the security of your account. Use a strong, unique password and do not share your login credentials. You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account. If you suspect unauthorised access, reset your password immediately via the password reset page.

Each person may hold one account. Creating multiple accounts to evade restrictions or manipulate the platform is not permitted.

4. Your content

Ownership. You retain full ownership of the content you post on A Walled Garden. We do not claim any intellectual property rights over your contributions.

Licence to us. By posting content, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to display, reproduce, and distribute that content solely for the purpose of operating the service — for example, showing your garden to visitors and including your works in explore pages. This licence ends when you delete the content or your account.

Your responsibility. You are responsible for the content you post. Do not post content that you do not have the right to share. When quoting or recommending the work of others, this is generally considered fair use or fair dealing, but you should not reproduce substantial portions of copyrighted works without permission.

5. Acceptable use

A Walled Garden is a space for thoughtful cultural curation. You agree not to:

  • Post content that is illegal, threatening, harassing, hateful, or discriminatory
  • Post spam, advertising, or promotional material
  • Impersonate another person or misrepresent your identity
  • Attempt to gain unauthorised access to other accounts or our systems
  • Use automated tools to scrape, crawl, or bulk-extract data from the site
  • Interfere with the operation of the service or impose unreasonable load on our infrastructure
  • Use the platform to distribute malware or phishing links

We interpret these guidelines with common sense. A negative book review is fine. A targeted attack on another user is not.

6. Content moderation

We reserve the right to review and remove content that violates these terms. If you encounter content that you believe violates these terms, please use the Report button on that content to flag it for review. We aim to review reports promptly, but we are a small team and cannot guarantee immediate action.

When we remove content, we will attempt to notify the user unless doing so would be inappropriate (e.g., in cases involving illegal content). Repeated violations may result in account suspension or termination.

7. Intellectual property

The A Walled Garden name, logo, design, and underlying code are our intellectual property. You may not copy, modify, or distribute them without our permission. User-generated content remains the property of its respective creators as described in section 4.

8. Account deletion

You may delete your account at any time from your Settings page. Deletion is permanent and removes all your data — your profile, garden content, quotes, re-recommendations, follows, likes, and saves. We do not retain copies of deleted data and cannot restore deleted accounts.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these terms. Where possible, we will provide notice and an explanation before doing so.

9. Availability and changes

We do our best to keep A Walled Garden available and reliable, but we cannot guarantee uninterrupted service. We may need to take the site offline for maintenance, and outages may occasionally occur. We may also modify, update, or discontinue features of the service over time.

10. Disclaimer of warranties

A Walled Garden is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied. We do not warrant that the service will be error-free, secure, or available at all times. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

11. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, A Walled Garden and its operators shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages arising from your use of the service, including but not limited to loss of data, loss of profits, or damage to reputation. Our total liability for any claim arising from these terms or the service shall not exceed the amount you have paid us (which, as the service is free, is zero).

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, or any other liability that cannot be excluded by law.

12. Privacy

Your use of A Walled Garden is also governed by our Privacy Policy, which explains what data we collect and how we use it.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. When we make significant changes, we will update the date at the top of this page and, where practical, notify users via the site. Continued use of the service after changes constitutes acceptance of the revised terms. If you disagree with updated terms, you may delete your account.

14. Governing law

These terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of Ireland. Any disputes arising from these terms or your use of the service shall be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Ireland.

15. Contact

If you have questions about these terms, please reach out via the contact information on our About page.