Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy applies to everyone who uses anything SpaltX operates: the account area, the project desk, the support desk, and every form on the site. It applies whether you hold an account or not, and it applies to a person you let use your account.

It is part of the Terms of Service, so breaking it is a breach of your agreement with us.

Claims about material you own go through the Copyright and Trademark Policy rather than through this one.

Every one of these takes text or files from you. Using one for something other than its purpose is the most common way this policy gets broken, and it is usually not malicious.

Do not submit, upload, store or share any of the following, anywhere on the Platform:

• Material that infringes copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret or any other right. This covers a model somebody else drew as much as it covers an image.
• Confidential information you are not free to hand over, including a drawing covered by someone else’s non-disclosure agreement.
• Personal data about other people beyond what a form asks for. Do not paste a customer list into a support ticket, and do not attach a file full of unrelated names to an inquiry.
• Threats, harassment, sexual content involving minors, incitement to violence, or material that exists to demean a person or a group.
• Malware, credential-stuffing lists, or code whose purpose is to compromise a system.
• Deliberate falsehoods that we act on: a fabricated defect report, an invented organization, or a requirement you know to be wrong when we are quoting against it.
• Advertising, link spam or bulk unsolicited mail, in an inquiry, a ticket or any other field.
• Anything a law that applies to you or to us forbids you to hold or to send us.

• Pretending to be someone else. Do not open an account in another person’s name, claim a role you do not hold in an organization, or present yourself as connected to SpaltX when you are not.
• Reaching data that is not yours. Do not try to open another account’s inquiries, proposals, tickets, projects or admin functions, whether by guessing an identifier, replaying a token, or asking support to hand them over.
• Working around a limit. Rate limits and share-link caps are limits. Opening a second account to get past one is a breach, and so is sharing a login to spread an allowance across people.
• Abusing staff. Support is answered by people. Abuse in a ticket gets the ticket closed, and a pattern of it gets the account restricted.
• Using our processes as a weapon. Do not file a copyright notice you know to be groundless, a chargeback for work you accepted, or a stream of privacy requests intended to occupy us rather than to get your data.

The Platform is rate limited per person and per address, and the limits are set so that ordinary use never touches them. If you are hitting one, something about how you are using the Platform is unusual.

• Automated access to public pages at a low volume is tolerated. Automated access that degrades the service for anyone else is not, and neither is bulk collection of help articles, blog posts or share pages.
• Do not run a client against the account area other than through the site itself.
• Do not probe, scan or load-test anything we run without written permission first. Section 8 explains how to ask.
• Do not interfere with a security control: session handling, two-factor enrolment, email verification, row-level security, or the audit log.

Two of the exchanges above move files rather than sentences, and each has a rule of its own.

• Sending us something you do not hold rights in. A supplier’s STEP file under an NDA, a paid model passed on outside its license, and a scan of a part you were not licensed to copy are each a breach, whether or not the work ever goes ahead. Tell us during scoping if a file comes with conditions, and we will work to them.
• Passing on a link we sent you. Design work is reviewed through a read-only share link. The link is the key: anyone holding the URL opens what it points at, with no account and no sign-in, so forwarding one hands over the access with it. We can stop a link resolving, and we cannot reach a file somebody already pulled through it.

Where an organization holds a space here, its owners are responsible for who they admit and for what those members do inside it.

Some uses are prohibited whatever the surface, and no contract with us changes that. Do not use anything SpaltX makes to:

• Design, build, arm or deliver a weapon, or make a part whose purpose is to injure a person.
• Follow, film, listen to or otherwise surveil a person who has not agreed to it, or to stalk, intimidate or harass anyone.
• Carry contraband, deliver anything into a prison or a secure site, or move goods past a border control.
• Interfere with emergency responders, disaster relief, law enforcement operations or a critical facility.
• Supply anything of ours, or technical data derived from it, to a sanctioned party or an embargoed destination, or to any end use our export obligations forbid.

Report in good faith and give us enough to act on. We treat a report as confidential within our team, and we will not pass your identity to the account you reported unless a law obliges us.

We investigate what we receive, we look at logs where we need to, and we choose a response that fits what happened. These are the responses that exist:

We aim to match the response to the harm. What we weigh is whether it was deliberate, whether it happened before, whether anyone was put at risk, and whether it can be undone. A first mistake made in good faith usually gets an email.

• Notice. Where we restrict or suspend an account we write to the address on it, saying what was done and why. We skip the notice beforehand only where telling you first would let the harm continue, and we send it afterwards.
• Reply to it. Answer the notice, or write to support@spaltx.com with APPEAL in the subject line. Tell us what we got wrong, or what has changed. Somebody other than the person who made the original decision reads it.
• Timing. We answer an appeal within ten business days. A restriction usually stays in place while we look at it, and we lift it immediately when we find we were wrong.

We update this policy as the Platform grows new surfaces. The effective date at the top moves when we do, and a change that materially widens what is prohibited is announced to account holders by email before it takes effect.

Ask a question about it at support@spaltx.com. Asking whether something is allowed is always cheaper than finding out.