Terms of Service

The agreement in plain language

These terms apply to your use of WinAddons, the news publication at winaddons.com, and to any feed or alert we publish from it. Using the site, including simply reading it, is acceptance of them. We have tried to write them so that they can be understood without a lawyer, but readability does not weaken them: these are the rules. If they are not acceptable, stop using the site; it costs nothing.

Who we are, and who we are not

WinAddons is an independently owned and run news publisher covering the Microsoft ecosystem for an international, English-reading readership. We are not Microsoft. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Microsoft, and nothing published here is an official statement of Microsoft’s plans, pricing, policies or support positions. Microsoft, Windows, Xbox, Azure, Microsoft 365, Teams, OneDrive and Outlook are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation, and they appear on this site only to identify the products we report on. Our editorial policies, our ownership and our funding each have a page of their own; those pages are our promise to readers, but they sit outside this legal agreement.

Using the site

You are welcome to read our articles, link to them and share those links, and to quote short passages with attribution to WinAddons and a link back to the original. You may not reproduce whole articles, copy or scrape the site systematically, republish our work elsewhere, or use it to build or train any product, model or dataset, unless we have agreed to it in writing. Licensing enquiries go to support@winaddons.com, and our DMCA and copyright policy explains how infringement is handled in both directions.

You must not disrupt the running of the site, test or break its security, flood its infrastructure, pass yourself off as the publication or its staff, submit anything intended to deceive, or use the site for an unlawful purpose. We may cut off any user or network we believe is abusing the site, without warning.

What belongs to us

The articles, headlines, graphics, design and code on this site are the property of WinAddons or of the licensors who let us use them. The WinAddons name and the look of the site are ours too; using either to suggest that we made or approved something we did not is not allowed. Public documents we reproduce, including release notes, advisories, filings and published specifications, stay what they are; the reporting built on them is ours.

What you send us, and what you post

Anything you send us, whether a tip, a letter, a document or a screenshot, remains your copyright. By sending it you grant WinAddons a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to publish it, edit it, quote from it and keep it in our archive as part of our journalism, in any format, with or without a credit as we agree between us. You confirm that you are entitled to send it and that our publishing it will not breach anyone else’s rights or a confidentiality obligation you are under. We are under no obligation to publish it. Material sent in confidence is governed by our contact page, whose rules prevail over this paragraph where the two differ.

Where comments are switched on, what you post is your responsibility. Anything unlawful, defamatory, threatening, discriminatory, irrelevant or promotional may be removed, and people who keep posting such things excluded. Contributions are not screened in advance, and we are not their publisher.

Not technical, financial or legal advice

We report on updates, patches, configurations, security advisories, licensing terms and cloud services. Reporting is not support. An article describing what an update changes is not an instruction to deploy it, and an article describing a workaround is no guarantee that it will behave the same way on your systems. Administrators should trial changes in a pilot ring, take backups before acting, and treat Microsoft’s own documentation and advisories as the guidance that counts. Coverage of Microsoft’s business, results or share price is not investment advice; coverage of licensing, regulation or litigation is not legal advice. Nothing here makes us your adviser. Our disclaimer expands on all of this.

Advertising and links to other sites

Advertisements on the site are labelled and delivered through a third-party advertising network, and sponsored content, whenever it appears, carries a sponsored label. We are not a party to any dealing between you and an advertiser, and we vouch for nothing an advertiser sells; what advertising we accept is governed by our advertise page. Our stories link out to Microsoft documentation, release notes, status pages, store listings, filings and other material so that you can check our work. Those sites are outside our control, and we answer for neither their content nor their accuracy, availability or privacy practices. Linking to a document is citing it, not endorsing it.

Warranties, liability and indemnity

We try hard to be right; our fact-checking policy says how we check and our corrections policy says how we fix. Even so, software news is written against the clock, and a build, a price, a date or a feature can change between our publishing and your reading. Everything on the site is offered as it is and as available, with no warranty, express or implied, that it is accurate, complete, fit for any particular purpose or available without interruption.

So far as the law permits, neither WinAddons nor anyone working on it is liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special or punitive loss that flows from using the site or relying on what it publishes, whether that loss takes the form of lost profit, lost data, downtime, a failed deployment, a bad trade or an interrupted business. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is capped at the amount you paid to use the site, which is nothing, or otherwise limited as far as the applicable law allows; nothing here excludes liability that the law does not permit to be excluded. If a breach of these terms on your part, or something you send us, draws a claim against us, you will make good the losses and costs that follow, reasonable legal fees included.

Governing law, changes and general terms

The law that governs these terms is that of the jurisdiction where the publisher of WinAddons is established, ignoring conflict-of-law rules, and disputes under them belong to the competent courts of that jurisdiction, save where the mandatory consumer law of your own residence lets you sue at home. Anyone with a legitimate need to know which jurisdiction that is, and our registered details, may write to support@winaddons.com with GENERAL in the subject line and will receive the answer in writing. Write to us before filing anything; most grievances against a news site are corrections in disguise, and those we settle in a day.

We may revise these terms. When we do, the revision date on this page changes, material changes are announced before they take effect, and continued use after that date is acceptance of the new terms. We may change, pause or close any part of the site whenever we choose. If a provision is held unenforceable, the rest survives, and letting a provision go unenforced once does not waive it. These terms, read with the privacy policy and the cookie policy, are the whole of the agreement between you and us concerning the site.