Terms of use for the Ruby Q&A forum
These terms apply to Ruby Q&A, a section of Poignant Guide served at poignantguide.net/answers/. By reading or posting here you agree to them. If you do not agree, please do not post. These terms are general information, not legal advice.
What the forum is
Ruby Q&A is a place to ask questions and share experience about learning Ruby and programming: syntax, blocks, objects, gems, Rails, debugging and reading Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby. It is general information for learning, not a consulting or security service, and nothing here creates a professional relationship with you.
No warranty on code
Answers come from two staff members and from other members. Staff answers try to follow the official Ruby documentation, but we can still be wrong, and Ruby, its gems and its tools change between versions. Member answers are personal experience and are not checked by us before they appear.
All code in the forum is provided as it is, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied. That includes code in questions, answers, examples and links. We do not promise that it works, is secure, is free of bugs or suits your purpose. Run code in a safe place first, keep backups, and never run code you do not understand against a live server or a database with real data. You use any code at your own risk.
No professional advice
Nothing in the forum is legal, financial, security or other professional advice. If your project handles personal data or takes payments, speak to a qualified professional. Answers about security are general and cannot replace a review of your own system.
Your account and your posts
You may post with a display name and an email address. You must give an address you control. One person should not run many accounts to get around limits, bans or the rules.
You are responsible for what you post. Follow the guidelines: put code in code blocks, leave out passwords, keys and credentials, credit your sources, do not post graded work for someone else to finish, and say when an answer is AI generated.
You keep your rights, and you license them for display
You keep ownership of what you write. By posting, you give the forum a permission to store your post, display it, make it searchable, quote short parts of it in search results and feeds, and keep it visible after you leave unless it is removed. This permission does not transfer ownership.
Only post what you have the right to share. Do not paste code that belongs to an employer or client. If you post code you copied, say where it came from.
Code in posts may be reused by readers
Because the forum exists to help people learn, code that you post in a question or an answer may be copied, run, changed and reused by readers in their own projects, personal or commercial, without asking you and without payment. Reuse does not give a reader any claim on your other work. If you do not want code reused, do not post it. If it has a licence, state it in the post.
The Poignant Guide is licensed separately
Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, kept at poignantguide.net/ruby/, is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 licence. That licence belongs to the guide and its original text. It is not a term of this forum, and these terms do not change it.
Moderation
Staff may hide or remove posts, lock or pin threads, remove exposed credentials or personal details, or ban an account, for breaking the guidelines or to protect people. We do not have to give a reason. Members can edit their own posts for 30 days after posting.
Availability
The forum may be unavailable, read only or changed at any time, and we do not promise that content will always be kept.
Limits of liability
The forum is offered as it is. To the extent the law allows, we are not responsible for loss or damage that results from using code or advice from the forum, from member posts, from outside links, or from the forum being unavailable. Nothing here limits rights you cannot waive under law.
Removal and complaints
To ask for a post to be corrected or removed, or to report a problem, email hello [at] poignantguide [dot] net with the web address. Notes on copyright are on the contact page.
Changes
We may update these terms. The date at the top shows when this version was written. Continued use after a change means you accept the new version.
How the forum handles information is described on the privacy page.