Submission Terms

1. What these cover

These terms apply to anything you send us through the Site, including:

• HOA stories
• Violation submissions
• Contractor reviews
• HOAIES nominations
• HOA Inspectors tryouts
• NIL roster signups
• Anything you email us with a story attached

We call all of that a “Submission.”

2. You keep it. We get permission to use it.

You continue to own your Submission. We’re not taking it from you and we’re not asking for exclusivity — you can tell the same story anywhere else, including on your own channels, whenever you like.

What you give us is a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use, reproduce, edit, adapt, translate, publish, distribute and perform your Submission, in any medium, for the purpose of running and promoting Drinking and HOAing. In practice that means we may:

• Publish it on the Site, in the newsletter, or on social platforms
• Rewrite, shorten, combine or dramatize it — a submission usually becomes a script
• Turn it into a video, a podcast segment, a slide, or a T-shirt line
• Keep it up after publication, and keep archival copies

This licence is for the Submission itself. It doesn’t transfer anything else you own, and it doesn’t give us rights over your name, face or voice — see section 7.

3. What you’re promising us

When you tick the consent box, you’re confirming that:

• It’s yours to send. You wrote it or you have the right to submit it, and it doesn’t infringe anyone’s copyright.
• You removed the identifying details. No real full names, street addresses, unit numbers, community names, license plates, or anything else that points at a specific person, household or association.
• It’s not confidential. You’re not sending us anything covered by a settlement, an NDA, a sealed order, or attorney-client privilege.
• It’s true as far as you know, or clearly offered as a joke.
• You’re 18 or older, and your Submission doesn’t identify a specific minor.
• It isn’t an attack. Not defamatory, not harassment, not an attempt to settle a private score by making someone identifiable to their neighbors.

4. What we promise you

• We anonymize by default. We remove names, addresses and community names as a matter of course, even if you forgot to.
• We don’t publish your last name unless you’ve specifically told us we can.
• We don’t sell your personal information. Ever. See the Privacy Policy.
• You choose the credit. Each form asks how you want to be attributed: first name, anonymous, or ask me first. We follow it.
• We’ll take it down. See section 6.

5. We don’t have to publish it

Sending something doesn’t oblige us to use it, and we may edit or decline anything for any reason. We also moderate: we remove submissions that look like harassment, that name real people, that appear to be a competitor or a vendor reviewing themselves, or that we simply can’t verify.

6. Changing your mind

Email impaired@drinkingandhoaing.com and ask us to pull it. We’ll take it down from the Site and stop using it going forward.

Two honest caveats. Content already published to a third-party platform, already printed, or already downloaded and reshared by other people may be beyond our reach — we’ll remove what we control and ask platforms to remove the rest, but we can’t guarantee every copy disappears. And we may keep an internal archival copy for our records.

7. Your name, image and likeness

These Submission Terms do not give us the right to use your face, voice or likeness in advertising. Nothing here signs you up to appear in anything.

If you join the NIL roster, that’s a separate arrangement: joining the roster is an expression of interest only, and any actual appearance in an advertiser’s campaign requires a separate written agreement covering that specific placement, its term, and what you’re paid. You can decline any placement, and you can leave the roster whenever you want.

8. Payment

Submissions are voluntary and unpaid unless we’ve agreed otherwise with you in writing. Occasional prizes — a free T-shirt, an award — aren’t payment and don’t change the licence in section 2. If a Submission ever becomes the basis of something commercially significant, we’d rather talk to you about it than rely on this paragraph.

9. Reviews specifically

Contractor reviews are your honest opinion of your own experience. Don’t review a business you own, work for, or compete with. Businesses can advertise with us, but no business can buy a rating, buy a review, or have an honest review removed. Paid placement is always labelled. That rule is the only reason the reviews are worth reading.

10. Liability

You’re responsible for what you send. If a Submission you made breaches these terms and that causes a claim against us, you agree to cover our reasonable costs in dealing with it. These terms sit alongside the Terms of Use, which include the limitations of liability.

11. Changes

We may update these terms. The version that applies to your Submission is the one published when you sent it. Material changes get flagged in the newsletter.

12. Contact

impaired@drinkingandhoaing.com — takedowns, corrections, attribution changes, or a question about any of this.