This policy covers how you may interact with ACADA's systems: your account, automated access, our infrastructure, and the course materials you download. It applies to everyone who uses ACADA, signed in or not. Use ACADA as a person, through the interface we provide, with an account that is yours. This summary is for orientation only. The sections below are the operative terms.
1. Who this applies to
"You" means anyone who accesses ACADA. That includes signed-in students, creators, authors, affiliates and admins, and it includes visitors who never create an account.
It applies everywhere ACADA runs: the marketplace, courses and lessons, Studio, rooms and direct messages, portfolios, press articles, certificate verification pages, and the systems behind all of them.
This policy is about how you use ACADA, not what you say or publish on it. Three other policies own those:
- What you may say to other people is covered by the Community Guidelines.
- What may never be published anywhere on ACADA is covered by Prohibited Content.
- Deceptive practices involving money, referrals or platform mechanics are covered by Fraud & Scams.
2. What we expect
Use ACADA the way it is built to be used: as a person, through the interface we provide, with an account that belongs to you, at a scale a person can produce.
Most people will never need this policy. It exists for the small number who try to take more access than they paid for, collect data that is not theirs, or degrade the service for everyone else.
3. Your account and access
Your account is yours alone.
- You must not share your password, or let another person sign in as you.
- You must not sell, rent, lend or transfer your account.
- You must not use anyone else's account, or credentials you did not obtain yourself.
- You must not create a new account to get around a suspension or ban.
There are sanctioned ways to work with other people, and you must use those instead of sharing a login. To build a course with someone, add them as a collaborator in Studio. To let someone help run a room, give them a role with the permissions they need.
Using one account to serve a group, such as a teacher showing a course to a class or a company to a team, needs our written permission first. Email abuse@acada.ac and tell us what you want to do. We do not offer institutional licensing yet, so treat permission as something you have only once we have said yes in writing.
You must not get around access controls, whether or not the workaround required any technical skill. Paywalls, enrolment checks, course prerequisites, room and channel permissions, and trial limits are all access controls. Editing a URL to open a lesson in a course you are not enrolled in is a breach of this section.
4. Automated access and data collection
You must not use bots, scrapers, crawlers, headless browsers, or any other automated means to access, collect or copy ACADA's content or data without our prior written permission. Request permission at abuse@acada.ac.
Two things are always allowed:
- Search engine crawlers indexing pages that are publicly visible without signing in.
- Your own data. You can export everything ACADA holds on you from your account settings, and you may do whatever you like with that export.
Beyond those, the following are breaches:
- Collecting other people's personal information, even where you can see it. Compiling the display names, portfolio links and enrolments of everyone in a room is a breach, whether or not you publish the list.
- Using automation to create accounts, send messages, post reviews, claim rewards, or inflate XP and leaderboard position.
- Copying the marketplace catalogue, in whole or in substantial part, by any means.
5. Interfering with our systems
You must not:
- Deliberately overload, degrade or disrupt ACADA, for example by flooding it with scripted requests, or by repeatedly triggering an expensive operation to slow the site for other people.
- Upload or transmit malware, or any file built to exploit a weakness in someone else's device.
- Probe, scan or test the security of ACADA's systems, except as section 7 allows.
- Reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any part of ACADA, except where the law gives you a right you cannot sign away.
- Interfere with rate limits, security controls or monitoring. Rotating IP addresses to keep trying discount codes after being throttled is a breach.
- Work around file size or storage limits, such as by splitting one oversized file across several uploads.
The ACADA Assistant is part of our systems, and the same principle applies. You must not query it in bulk or through automation, try to extract its underlying instructions or another user's context from it, or use it to probe the platform. Rules about publishing work that AI helped you produce live in the AI Content Policy.
6. Course materials and downloads
Course materials belong to the creators who made them. Enrolling buys you access to study them. It does not transfer ownership, and it does not give you the right to pass them on.
You may download any material a course offers for download, and you may keep those files for your own study permanently, including after your access to the course ends.
You must not share, resell, republish, or upload those materials anywhere else, and you must not use them to teach other people. This holds whether or not you charge anyone. Posting a course's workbook in a public chat server, or re-uploading its lessons to another platform, is a breach either way.
You must not record, screen-capture or re-host course video, and you must not extract media a course does not offer for download.
If you believe a course contains material that infringes your copyright, use the process in Copyright & DMCA rather than reporting it here.
7. Security research
We want to hear about vulnerabilities. If you follow this section, we will not pursue legal action against you for your research, and we will not suspend your account for it.
To stay inside that protection you must:
- Test only against your own account and your own data.
- Stop as soon as you have confirmed a vulnerability, and not access, change, delete or download data belonging to anyone else.
- Report what you found to security@acada.ac before telling anyone else, and give us 90 days to fix it before disclosing publicly.
- Avoid anything that degrades the service for other people, including denial-of-service, load testing and stress testing.
- Leave our staff and our users alone. Social engineering and phishing are never in scope.
We will acknowledge your report within 5 business days. We do not run a paid bounty programme, so we cannot promise payment for a finding.
8. How we enforce this
We may restrict, suspend or permanently close an account that breaches this policy. Where a breach involves published material, we may also remove that content or revoke access to a course. Where it involves money a creator or affiliate has earned through the breach, we may withhold the payout.
For most breaches we warn you first and give you a chance to stop. We act immediately, without a warning, in three cases:
- An active attack on our systems or another person's account.
- An attempt to reach data belonging to someone else.
- Distributing course materials at scale.
The full ladder from warning to permanent closure, and how to appeal at each step, is set out in Account Enforcement & Appeals.
9. Reporting a violation, and how to reach us
To report someone breaching this policy, use the Report action on the profile, course, message or assignment submission in question. It reaches our moderation queue directly and tells us what you were looking at.
You can also email abuse@acada.ac. Tell us what you saw, where on ACADA you saw it, and roughly when. We will acknowledge every report within 5 business days.
Security vulnerabilities go to security@acada.ac under section 7, not to the addresses above. General questions about this policy go to support@acada.ac.
10. Changes to this policy
We update this policy when the platform changes, or when we see a kind of abuse it does not yet cover. The date at the foot of this page always shows when it last changed.
When a change materially widens what is prohibited, we will email account holders at least 30 days before it takes effect. Smaller changes, such as a clearer example or a corrected link, take effect when we post them.
11. Related policies
- Terms of Service: the umbrella agreement this policy sits under, and the source of the terms used here.
- Community Guidelines: the standard for how you treat other people, where this policy governs how you treat our systems.
- Prohibited Content: material that is never allowed on ACADA, regardless of how it got here.
- Fraud & Scams: deceptive practices involving payments, referrals and platform mechanics.
- Account Enforcement & Appeals: what happens after a breach, and how to contest it.
- Copyright & DMCA: the route for infringement complaints about course materials.