Terms of Service
Last updated: 11 May 2026
Welcome to CORE. These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of the CORE platform, tools, websites, and services (collectively, the “Service”). By using CORE, you agree to these Terms.
About Core Australia
Core Australia (“CORE”, “we”, “our”, “us”) is a not-for-profit, community-operated platform that provides a ready-to-use WordPress + CiviCRM integration system for community groups, causes, and campaigns.
CORE may offer guaranteed commercial support, but only on agreed terms under a formal negotiated commercial contract.
Acceptance of These Terms
By using the Service, creating a CORE site, or accessing any CORE-hosted instance, you agree that:
- These Terms form a binding agreement between you and CORE
- Continued use of the Service constitutes acceptance of any updated Terms
- You have the authority to act on behalf of your organisation, where applicable
If you do not agree with these Terms, you must stop using the Service.
Eligibility
You must:
- Be 16 years or older
- If you are 13–16, use CORE only with active parental or guardian permission and only where allowed by law
- Have the capacity to enter into agreements
- Use the Service in compliance with local, state, and federal laws
Your Account and Responsibilities
Account Security
You are responsible for keeping your passwords secure, enabling two-factor authentication where available, preventing unauthorised access to your account, and all actions taken using your account. We are not responsible for unauthorised access caused by weak passwords, shared accounts, or failure to secure devices.
Ownership of a CORE Site
The “Site Owner” is the person or organisation that created the CORE instance or holds the primary administrative email. The Site Owner controls admin permissions, content, data ownership, and user access. We do not manage internal ownership disputes.
Ownership Transfer
CORE may transfer ownership of a site at the request of the current Site Owner, upon written agreement between involved parties, or to an authorised organisational delegate. CORE does not adjudicate disputes between individuals or factions within an organisation.
Acceptable Use
You must not use CORE to:
- Break local, state, or federal laws
- Defame, harass, or harm others
- Spread harmful misinformation
- Send unsolicited bulk communications
- Perform activities that endanger CORE infrastructure
- Engage in election-related activity that violates the Electoral Act or related regulations
- Attempt to access or disrupt another CORE site
An additional Acceptable Use Policy may apply.
Community Support
CORE is a community-supported, open-source ecosystem. Support is not guaranteed, is provided voluntarily, and may be withdrawn at any time. Users remain fully responsible for operating their own site.
Platform Availability
The Service is provided “as-is” and “as available”. This means:
- No guaranteed uptime
- Features may change, break, or be removed
- Maintenance windows may occur without notice
- Outages may happen due to third-party providers
CORE is not liable for downtime or service interruptions.
Third-Party Services
CORE may integrate with or rely on third-party services such as email providers (SES, Mailgun, SendGrid), SMS gateways, mapping tools, payment processors, analytics tools, and hosting services (AWS, Cloudflare). CORE does not control these services, is not responsible for outages, errors, breaches, or costs they cause, and is not liable for their failures. You must comply with their terms in addition to ours.
Data and Content
You Own Your Content
You retain full ownership of all content you upload or generate through the Service, including contacts and CRM records, email content and campaigns, media and file uploads, event information, posts, pages, forms, documents, and any other data you create or import. Nothing in these Terms transfers ownership of your content to CORE.
Licence You Grant to CORE
By using the Service, you grant CORE a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide licence to store your data, display your content as part of your website, back up and replicate data for operational purposes, and process your data as necessary to provide the Service. This licence exists solely to enable us to operate the Service. CORE does not claim ownership over your data and does not use your content for marketing, analytics, or any unrelated purpose.
Your Responsibility for Content
You are entirely responsible for all content you upload, store, or distribute through the Service. This includes ensuring that your content is lawful in every jurisdiction where you operate, and complies with privacy, anti-spam, and data-protection laws. CORE does not review or vet your content and is not liable for issues arising from it.
Data Retention and Deletion
When your account or site is suspended, terminated, or closed, access to your site and data may be removed immediately. Your data may be permanently deleted after a short retention period. Backups are not guaranteed and may not be recoverable. CORE is under no obligation to retain or return your data.
You are responsible for exporting your data before closure, maintaining your own backups, and ensuring compliance with any legal record-keeping obligations. If you lose access to your site without exporting your data, CORE is not responsible for any resulting loss.
Email Sending and Compliance
Certain features of the CORE platform allow you to send email using integrated email services. By enabling or using any email-sending functionality, you accept full responsibility for all outbound email sent from your account or site. CORE does not monitor, review, approve, or assume liability for your email content, contact lists, or sending practices.
Compliance Obligations
You must comply with all applicable email, privacy, and electronic communication laws, including the Australian Spam Act 2003, CAN-SPAM Act, GDPR and similar international standards, and the acceptable use policies of any integrated email provider. You must not upload or send to purchased, scraped, rented, or third-party marketing lists.
Consent and Mailing Lists
You are solely responsible for ensuring that all recipients have clearly opted in, your communications are lawful, accurate, and non-misleading, your mailing lists remain permission-based, and your list management practices comply with anti-spam legislation. CORE does not validate, review, or approve your contact lists.
Bounce, Complaint and Unsubscribe Handling
You must maintain a functional process for hard and soft bounce handling, spam complaint management, removing invalid recipients, and honouring unsubscribe requests promptly. CORE may surface bounce and complaint information in technical logs, but you are responsible for acting on it.
Deliverability, Reputation and Sending Limits
Your sending reputation belongs to you, not CORE. Poor list hygiene may result in throttling, reduced deliverability, or loss of sending capability. Sending limits may apply and can change. You are responsible for monitoring your email volume and performance. Email providers may block, restrict, or suspend messages based on your behaviour. CORE is not liable for any enforcement action or message blocking imposed by upstream providers.
Test-Sending and Testing Domains
When you first configure email on your CORE site, CORE will provide a dedicated testing domain for development and verification. This domain is intended solely for testing and internal evaluation — you must not rely on it for production sending. You must verify and configure your own production sending domain before sending to real recipients. Using the testing domain for outreach, newsletters, campaigns, or other production activity is strictly prohibited.
DNS, Domain Verification and Identity Management
You are responsible for verifying your own sending domains, configuring DNS records such as SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, ensuring accurate “From”, “Reply-To”, and “Return-Path” addresses, and resolving any domain conflicts or verification issues. CORE can provide documentation or automated tools, but setup accuracy is your responsibility.
Costs and Billing
Where email providers charge for usage, you are responsible for all associated costs. Pricing is set by the upstream provider and may change. CORE does not issue credits, refunds, or disputes on your behalf.
Email Liability and Indemnification
CORE is not responsible for message delivery failures, spam filtering or blocklisting, provider-level throttling, loss of messages or delays, sending suspensions imposed by third-party services, or legal issues arising from your email content or list practices. You agree to indemnify and hold harmless CORE, its volunteers, contributors, and infrastructure providers from any claims, penalties, or losses arising from your email-sending behaviour, content, list management, or breach of email laws or provider terms.
Security
CORE takes reasonable steps to maintain secure systems, but no platform is perfectly secure. Backups may not always be available. You must manage your own data exports and safeguard your login credentials. You agree not to upload extremely sensitive data such as credit card numbers, medical records, or government identifiers.
Suspension and Termination
CORE may suspend or terminate your access immediately if you breach these Terms, your site engages in spam or harmful activity, your site threatens platform stability or security, you engage in illegal or unethical conduct, you misuse messaging tools, or you fail to comply with applicable laws. Once suspended, data access may be restricted. CORE may refuse future service to users who commit serious violations.
Force Majeure
CORE is not responsible for failures caused by events outside our control, including cyberattacks, natural disasters, power outages, government action, network or hosting failures, infrastructure disruptions, or other emergencies.
Dispute Resolution
These Terms are governed by the laws of Queensland, Australia. Any disputes must be resolved through the courts of Queensland, unless another jurisdiction is required by law.
Warranty Disclaimer
To the maximum extent permitted by law, CORE provides the Service without any warranty, express or implied. We do not guarantee uptime, feature availability, or data integrity. You use CORE at your own risk. Australian Consumer Law rights still apply where required.
Limitation of Liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law, CORE is not liable for loss of data, revenue, reputation, or business, or for actions taken using your account. CORE’s total liability is limited to the greater of $0 (where the Service is free) or the amount you actually paid for CORE, if any.
Indemnity
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless CORE, its volunteers, contributors, and infrastructure providers from claims arising from your content, your misuse of the Service, your breach of these Terms, your violation of the law, or claims of defamation, copyright infringement, or privacy breaches.
Changes to These Terms
We may update these Terms from time to time. Major changes will be announced on this website or through other communication channels. Continued use of the Service constitutes acceptance of updated Terms.