Welcome to thebuddhistcentre.com, a space for the whole Triratna Buddhist Community and anyone who wishes to connect with others in the spirit of the Dharma. We’re really excited to see what directions the site takes – thanks for being a part of it!
Here are our
Community Guidelines, which are designed to help create a positive environment for all who value this space…
- Please be courteous at all times. If you’re engaged in any kind of discussion, please avoid swearing/cursing and be as prepared to listen as you are to express yourself. Remember that there’s always a real person behind a computer screen, and they are likely quite different from you!
- Think twice before posting anything that’s likely to give offence or be inflammatory. That doesn’t promote good conversation. If you’re upset at something you see here, perhaps let a little time pass before responding. Bear in mind this isn’t a space to vent our views, it’s about exploring respectfully with others what it means to be a Buddhist within our community and in the modern world generally.
- This site is intended primarily for the discussion and sharing of Buddhist practice. Please do not upload images or video that are obviously unrelated to the context you’re taking part in. We may remove posts that are considered off-topic from groups and blogs. Please do not make posts with gratuitously violent or explicitly sexual content on any space on the site. And please also abide by our position with regard to the posting of copyrighted material.
- Everyone has off-moments, and we’ll always try to be in friendly dialogue with you if a problem arises with one of your contributions. But we reserve the right to remove comments and posts (or even suspend user accounts) when we feel these guidelines are not observed. Needless to say, we won’t tolerate any kind of hate speech, ‘trolls’ or ‘flame wars’ here.
Whatever you contribute we very much encourage you to think about it in the light of the Buddhist ethical precepts around
‘Right Speech’. These encourage communication that is:
- Truthful
- Helpful and harmonious
- Kindly and gracious
We look forward to all you have to bring to the site!
Uploading Content
All content uploaded and published publicly to thebuddhistcentre.com, or to any of our other publicly available online spaces, may be shared or re-published by us and others (non-exclusively) on social networks and in other media contexts associated with our website within the terms of our site’s non-commercial
Creative Commons license.
That was the legal bit! Basically, you still own all of your personal contributions to thebuddhistcentre.com across the web even if you upload them for all to see, but please remember they may appear elsewhere too. You can edit and delete your own contributions
at any time on our website, but they may persist in other spaces if they have been shared or re-published there.
Your Privacy
We wanted to let you know how we manage your personal information on this site, which we always treat with the utmost care. Please read all of this note and the other sections of our
community guidelines before submitting any personal information so you can be confident of your security with us. By logging in, you are saying you’re happy with how we handle things. If you have any concerns, please feel free to
info [at] thebuddhistcentre [dot] com (subject: Privacy) (contact us) at any time.
While our privacy policy may change slightly from time to time as the site develops, our key principles will remain the same:
- All your information is treated securely on the server.
- As a rule, we won’t share your account details with other organisations. If there seems a good reason to give you that option, we’ll always ask for your explicit permission and make participation opt-in (and reversible!).
- We will never sell or commercialise your personal information.
- Your account information belongs to you. If you cancel your account with us we won’t retain your records unless you ask us to.
Any future changes made will only apply to activities and information submitted after we’ve posted them here and let you know by email, not on a retroactive basis. We encourage you to review our privacy policy whenever we alert you to a change to make sure you understand how any new personal information you provide here will be used.
Please note: this privacy policy only applies to our web site. If you post or link to other web spaces (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, etc.) via our site or any of our services, please review the privacy policies posted at those sites.
Cookies
Our site uses two kinds of cookies to store information on your computer. One kind lets us know who you are when you are logging in and out (so we can show you what you want to see) and areas of the site won’t work without it! We never share any of your actual account information from the site with anyone via cookies.
The other kind is from Google Analytics, which helps us keep track of how many people visit our site and what pages they use. It’s completely anonymous (we never track your activity anywhere else on the web!) and any data relating to your time on our site is only retained in the form of general statistics (eg. 500 people visited a certain page with a picture gallery on it). This allows us to develop the site in line with the community’s use and needs.
When we host content on external sites (eg. YouTube, Vimeo), it’s possible that some of them may employ cookies when you access that content via our site. We can’t control this, but we don’t allow external sites any access to any of your personal account data or to track your web use generally via our site. Please see
here and
here for more information on the ‘Do Not Track’ initiative and your web browser.
Logging into thebuddhistcentre.com means that you have read this privacy policy and are happy with our use of cookies on the site.
Gathering information
As part of our service we collect personally identifiable information, like names, email addresses, etc., when these are voluntarily submitted by our users. The information you provide us with is only used to fulfill your specific request, unless you give us permission to use it in another way, e.g. to add you to our mailing list.
Complying with the law (the very legal bit)
We may share information with governmental agencies or other institutions if required by law, and/or we need to in order to protect against or prevent or investigate actual or potential fraud or unauthorised transactions. Only authorised employees, agents and contractors (who have agreed to keep information secure and confidential) have access to basic account information.
Data breaches
If there’s ever any breach of security with our site or server or database, we’ll let you know promptly.
