About

Since 2009, SIL Africa has hosted conferences and an online community for English- and French-speaking Christian IT workers supporting people in Africa. With God’s help, we encourage and help each other tackle challenging issues in Africa such as software, hardware, infrastructure, wireless communication, and much more. 

If you would like to participate in the ITConnect online community, please review our Terms of Service below and contact us with your name, organization, and a description of your support role.

Terms of Service

The following Terms of Service apply to your use of the AfricaIT online forum henceforth referred to as “the Forum”. You are solely responsible for your conduct and your content on the Forum and compliance with these terms. By registering on, using, or browsing this Forum, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these terms.

You agree that you will not post, email or make available any content or use this Forum:

• In a manner that infringes, violates or misappropriates any third party’s intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights or contractual rights;

• in a manner that contains software viruses or any other computer code, files or programs designed to interrupt, destroy or limit the functionality of any computer software or hardware or telecommunications equipment;

• to engage in spamming, “chain letters,” “pyramid schemes”, advertisement of illegal or controlled products or services, or other advertising or marketing activities that violate these Terms of Service, any applicable laws, regulations or generally-accepted advertising industry guidelines;

• in a manner that is misleading, deceptive or fraudulent or otherwise illegal or promotes illegal activities, including engaging in phishing or otherwise obtaining financial or other personal information in a misleading manner or for fraudulent or misleading purposes;

• in a manner that is libelous or defamatory, or in a way that is otherwise threatening, abusive, violent, harassing, malicious or harmful to any person or entity, or invasive of another’s privacy;

• in a manner that is harmful to minors in any way;

• in a manner that is hateful or discriminatory based on race, color, sex, religion, nationality, ethnic or national origin, marital status, disability, sexual orientation or age or is otherwise objectionable;

• to impersonate any other person, or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with any person or entity, or to obtain access to this Forum without authorisation;

• to interfere or attempt to interfere with the proper working of this Forum or prevent others from using this Forum, or in a manner that disrupts the normal flow of dialogue with an excessive number of messages (flooding attack) to this Forum, or that otherwise negatively affects other persons’ ability to use this Forum;

• to use any manual or automated means, including agents, robots, scripts, or spiders, to access or manage any user’s account or to monitor or copy this Forum or the content contained therein;

• to facilitate the unlawful distribution of copyrighted content;

• in a manner that includes personal or identifying information about another person without that person’s explicit consent;

• in a manner that employs misleading email or IP addresses, or forged headers or otherwise manipulated identifiers in order to disguise the origin of content transmitted through this Forum or to users; and

• in a manner that constitutes or contains any form of advertising or solicitation.

Additionally, you agree not to:

• “Stalk” or otherwise harass anyone;

• Collect, use or disclose data, including personal information, about other users without their consent or for unlawful purposes or in violation of applicable law or regulations;

• Request, solicit or otherwise obtain access to usernames, passwords or other authentication credentials from any member of this Forum or to proxy authentication credentials for any member of this Forum for the purposes of automating logins to this Forum;

• Use automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from this Forum – except for Internet search engines (e.g., Google) and non-commercial public archives (e.g., archive.org) that comply with our robots.txt file, or “well-behaved” web services/RSS/Atom clients. We reserve the right to define what we mean by “well-behaved”;

• Post irrelevant content, repeatedly post the same or similar content or otherwise impose an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on the Forum’s infrastructure;

• Attempt to gain unauthorized access to our service provider’s computer systems or engage in any activity that disrupts, diminishes the quality of, interferes with the performance of, or impairs the functionality of, this Forum;

• Use this Forum as a generic file hosting service; and,

• Develop, invoke, or utilize any code to disrupt, diminish the quality of, interfere with the performance of, or impair the functionality of this Forum.

You agree not to authorize or encourage any third party to use this Forum to facilitate any of the foregoing prohibited conduct.

Privacy Policy

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

• Posts: When users make posts to the Forum, we collect the data shown in the posts form along with the user’s IP address and browser user agent string to help with spam detection.

• Media: If you upload images to the Forum, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the Forum can download and extract any location data from images on the Forum.  We do not require or use that information, if included.

• Contact forms: The information collected on the Contact Us page is only used to respond to you.

• Cookies: 

  • If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

  • When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

  • If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

  • Other than any cookies used by Google Analytics (which we cannot see) and the session cookies mentioned above (if applicable), this Forum does not use cookies to collect any data about you.

• Embedded content from other websites

  • Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

  • These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

• Analytics: This Forum uses Google Analytics to help us understand how visitors interact with the Forum, but we do NOT use it to track, collect or send to Google any data that personally identifies an individual.  For more information on how Google Analytics collects and processes data, see “How Google uses data when you use our partners’ sites or apps”: https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/partners/

Who we share your data with

We do not share your data with any third parties.  We do not rent or sell email addresses. We do not use the information you provide or that we collect for any purpose other than to provide this Forum.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a post, the post and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up responses automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For registered users, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their own personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Forum administrators can also see and edit that information.

What rights you have over your data

If you are a registered user on this Forum, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

This Forum is hosted in the United States and all site-related personal information resides there.  Posts may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Contact

Please contact us if you have any questions.