Policies and Guidelines

VGSpartans is a school platform run by one Vista Grande student for the Vista Grande community. That is unusual enough that the rules are worth reading: there is no company behind this, no advertising in it, and no support department. What there is instead is written down here.

How the three fit together

They are not three separate rulebooks. They stack.

1. The Terms of Service is the agreement. It is the document that says what you may do on the platform, what the platform may do, who owns what, and what happens when a rule is broken.
2. The Privacy Policy is part of that agreement by reference. Where a question is about your data rather than your conduct, it is the document that answers it.
3. The Community Guidelines sit underneath both. They are the day-to-day version: what you can and cannot post, everywhere on the platform and then in each space separately. They add to the Terms, never replace them.

Where two of them cover the same ground and one is stricter, follow the stricter one. Where a space’s own guidelines are stricter than the platform-wide ones, follow the space.

If you are only here for one thing

• Something of mine was taken down. Start with the Community Guidelines, which say how content is checked and how to appeal a decision.
• I want to know what you know about me. The Privacy Policy lists every category of data, why it is collected, and how long it is kept.
• I am signing up and want to know what I am agreeing to. The Terms of Service is that agreement, and Part III is the half that applies to people with accounts.
• Someone is being harmed. Do not start with a document. Use Report content if it is something posted here, and tell a teacher or a counsellor if it is not.

When these change

Every document carries the date it last changed, at the top. The Terms say how notice is given before a material change takes effect, and that section is the promise, not this page. The Privacy Policy says the same for your data.

They are markdown files in the platform’s public repository, so the full history of every one of them is a matter of record: what changed, when, and in the same pull request as the change to the platform it describes. Every page has an “Edit this page on GitHub” link at the bottom that opens the exact file. If you think a sentence in here is wrong, unclear, or says something the platform does not actually do, that link is how you say so, and a support ticket works too.

Every document

Part 1The agreementThe terms you agree to by using VGSpartans, and what happens to the data it holds about you.2 documentsPart 2Community guidelinesWhat you can post: the rules that apply everywhere, then the extra rules each space adds on top.9 documents

What is not in here

Two sets of rules govern what happens on VGSpartans and are not written by it.

• The school's own rules. The Vista Grande student handbook and the district's acceptable-use policy still apply to everything you do here, and where they are stricter than these documents, they win. Nothing on this site can sign away a school rule.
• The law. These documents say what we do; they do not override what Arizona and federal law require of a service used by minors. Where the two disagree, the law is what happens.

How the platform actually implements any of this - how content is scanned, what a take-down does, where the data sits - is documented in the handbook, and the code itself is public in the repository. If a document here and the platform's behaviour disagree, that is a bug: open a support ticket and it gets fixed.