Terms of use

Who provides the service

ZooPlanet is a volunteer project based in Serbia. It is built and run in their own time by Marko Dinić, Marko Aleksić, Dušan Manić and Nikola Ristić, without charge, without employees, and without taking a commission from either shelters or donors.

The service is the zooplanet.org website and a mobile app that works over the same account and the same data. Everything in these terms applies equally to both.

Accepting these terms

By using the site or the app you accept these terms. If you do not agree with them, do not create an account and do not use the service.

You may create an account if you are at least 16 years old. We do not ask for a date of birth and do not verify age, but we delete a younger person's account as soon as we learn of it.

Your account

An account needs an e-mail address, a first and last name, and a password. What you enter should be accurate; an account in someone else's name, or one created to pass as a particular shelter, is not allowed.

You are answerable for your password and for everything done under your account. If you suspect somebody else has got into it, change the password and tell us.

Roles on the site — volunteer, shelter administrator — are granted by us and cannot be claimed through the registration form. The server checks every write permission independently of what the interface happens to show.

What is not allowed

The service exists so that shelters in Serbia find help more easily. Anything that undermines that is not allowed, and in particular:

• publishing false information about an animal, a shelter or its costs, or raising money for an animal that does not exist or is not at the shelter named;
• publishing other people's photographs or writing without the right to do so;
• publishing photographs of or information about children, and any content that sexually exploits or endangers a child — there is a separate page for this and the tolerance is zero;
• harassment, threats, hate speech, and publishing other people's personal details;
• showing violence against animals for shock value, as opposed to describing the real condition of an animal being helped;
• spam, advertising, and content with nothing to do with animals and shelters;
• circumventing sign-in or permission checks, attempting to reach another person's account, and publishing malicious code;
• automated harvesting that loads the service. The site publishes a sitemap and machine-readable files for exactly this; use those.

The content you publish

The photographs, text and notes you create stay yours. By publishing them you grant us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence to display them on the site and in the app, to derive smaller renditions and a sharing card from a photograph, and — only where a shelter has connected its own account — to publish them to that shelter's social media. No other use is covered.

Everything published against an animal is public: visible to anyone on the internet, indexed by search engines, and shareable onwards. Care-journal notes are not public and are visible only to someone entitled to edit that animal. Photographs have the phone's metadata, location included, stripped from them as they are published, so a picture does not disclose where it was taken — but the picture itself is public, so mind what is visible in it.

By publishing, you confirm that you have the right to that content and that publishing it infringes nobody's rights. Content that breaches these terms is removed, as a rule without prior notice where child safety or plain fraud is involved.

Shelters and volunteers

Shelters run their own pages and their animals' profiles: they enter the photographs, the description, the list of costs and the prices. We do not vet that content in advance and cannot guarantee it is accurate. If you spot something wrong, tell us and we will look into it.

A shelter's administrators can see which volunteer changed what, and can withdraw a member's right to write. The member is not deleted in the process: the record of edits remains, because it is the only way a shelter can later reconstruct what happened to an animal.

Donations — who receives the money

This is the most important section of these terms and it differs from what people usually assume. When you donate through the site, the money is received by ZooPlanet, not by the shelter. ZooPlanet is the merchant of record: there is exactly one Stripe account and it is ours, the transaction is booked to us, and your counterparty is us.

Every payment is recorded with what it is earmarked for — a particular animal, a shelter, a campaign, or the project itself. We then pass the money to the shelter by bank transfer, made by hand, and we keep a record of each such transfer with its amount and reference. We take no commission; the shelter receives the full amount less only Stripe's processing fee, unless you chose to cover that fee when donating.

It works this way because Serbia is not a country in which Stripe opens merchant accounts, so a shelter cannot be the recipient of a Stripe payment. That has a consequence you should know: until the money has been transferred on, it is held by us rather than by the shelter, and the shelter's claim to it rests on the promise in these terms rather than on a payment rail.

A donation is a gift, not a purchase. You receive no goods or services for it, we issue no tax receipts and we give no tax advice. A recurring gift (monthly, quarterly or annual) can be cancelled at any time, through the Stripe portal linked from the thank-you page or by writing to us. When online payment is switched off, the donate button says so plainly and nothing is charged.

Refunds

If you donated by mistake, twice, or in the wrong amount, write to us within fourteen days and we will refund it provided it has not yet been passed to the shelter. We do that as a matter of decency, not because a statutory right of withdrawal applies — a donation is a gift and that right does not reach it.

Once an amount has been transferred to a shelter, a refund is no longer ours alone to give. In that case we will tell you when the transfer was made and help you approach the shelter, but we cannot promise a refund.

No warranty

The service is provided as it is. We do not promise it will run without interruption or without faults, nor that the information shelters have entered is complete and accurate. Four people build this in their spare time and it should be approached accordingly.

We also do not promise that any particular animal will be adopted, or that the money raised will cover its costs.

Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect loss, lost profit or lost data arising from use of the service, nor for the acts of shelters, volunteers and other users.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law — above all for intentionally caused damage and for gross negligence — nor any rights consumers have under mandatory provisions.

The name, the mark and the site itself

The ZooPlanet name, mark and the design of the site belong to the project. Do not use them in a way that suggests something is ours, or that we are associated with something we are not.

Content entered by shelters and volunteers belongs to them. If you want to reproduce text or a photograph from the site elsewhere, ask the shelter that published it, or ask us and we will put you in touch.

Stopping, and closing your account

You can stop using the service whenever you like. An account is closed on request, by the procedure on the account deletion page, which also sets out what is deleted, what is separated from your name and what remains.

We may restrict or close an account where these terms are seriously breached, and without notice where child safety, fraud or an attack on the service is involved. Wherever possible we write and ask first.

Closing an account does not by itself remove animal profiles and photographs that belong to a shelter — those stay on that shelter's pages. If you want a particular photograph removed, say which and we will remove it.

Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. The date of the last change is at the top of the page and moves in the same edit that changes the text.

Substantial changes are published on the site before they take effect, and we e-mail everyone with a confirmed address. If you do not agree with a change, you can close your account.

Governing law and jurisdiction

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of Serbia. Disputes fall to the competent court in the Republic of Serbia.

If you are a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection given to you by the mandatory rules of your own country.

Contact

Questions about these terms, reports of content that breaches them, and anything to do with a donation go to kontakt@zooplanet.org.