Terms of Service
These are the terms you accept by using WORLDHAB. We have written them in the same language as everything else here, and where a clause has to be precise to be worth anything, it is precise rather than friendly. Last updated: August 2026.
Who these terms cover
Reading the site, subscribing to the newsletter or leaving a comment means you accept what is on this page. If a clause here is unacceptable to you, the remedy is to stop using the site.
You need to be old enough to enter a contract where you live, and readers under 16 should be here with a parent’s knowledge. Anyone accepting these terms for a company confirms they may do that on its behalf.
What we own, and the licence you get
The articles, headlines, photographs, illustrations, charts, page design and the site name belong to us or to the people who licensed material to us. Nothing here is in the public domain because it is free to read. Free to read means we chose advertising over a paywall, as our ownership and funding page sets out.
You get a personal, non-commercial, revocable licence to read the site, print a page for yourself, send somebody a link, and quote a short passage with attribution and a link back. It does not cover reproducing an article on another site, in an app, in a newsletter or in a document you sell, and it does not cover putting another name on our work. Republication is a separate conversation, on our copyright page.
Scraping, and machines that eat archives
You may not run bulk automated collection against this site. That means crawlers ignoring our robots file, scripts walking every article in a section, feed rewriters that republish our copy with the sentences shuffled, and anything hitting the servers hard enough to slow a page for a reader. Search crawlers that respect the robots file are welcome, because they send readers, which is the trade.
Using our archive to train or fine-tune a machine learning model, a large language model or any generative system requires our written permission, and we have not given it. We reserve our rights under every text and data mining exception available to us, and no licence is granted by implication, by our leaving the site open, or by our failing to block a user agent. The blocklist we keep is not the edge of what is permitted, only our attempt to enforce a line these terms already draw.
We are not neutral about this one. Our founding editors spent years on rewrite desks whose brief was taking a story somebody else had actually reported, changing enough wording that it registered as new, and publishing inside the hour. We know what that produces because we produced it, and the visa story that made us build this site was a dozen versions of the same trick. A model doing that at scale, with no reporter and no editor to answer for it, is the same business with the human cost stripped out. Our reporting can be quoted, cited, argued with and linked to. It is not raw material.
Comments and anything else you send us
Comments are open on some articles and we moderate them. Nothing defamatory, nothing publishing a private person’s details, no threats, no harassment, no material infringing copyright, no promotional posts or link drops, and no reopening one argument across fifty posts. We remove what breaks those rules, and will explain the reason if you ask.
What you post stays yours. By posting it you give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to display, store, move, edit for length and clarity, and quote it, and you confirm the words are yours to give. Do not send confidential material through the comment box. Our contact page explains how to label a message about a story.
Links out, and things embedded from elsewhere
We link to sources, documents and other outlets constantly, because a claim a reader can check is worth more than one taken on trust. Those sites are not ours. We do not control what they publish after we link, or what they collect when you arrive, so a link is a citation rather than a recommendation.
Some articles carry video, social posts, maps or audio players hosted by other companies. Loading one connects you to that company on its own terms, and those terms are not these terms. What an embed sets on your device is covered in our cookie policy.
What we do not warrant
The site is provided as it is. We do not warrant uninterrupted availability, freedom from errors, or that a fact accurate on the day we published it is still accurate today. Entry rules change, recalls get widened, figures get revised, and an article is a record of what was true when it was checked.
We also do not warrant the site as a source of professional advice, because it is not one. What that means for money, health, law and travel stories is on our disclaimer page. Where the applicable law will not allow a warranty to be excluded, this clause does not try to.
Liability, and what falls on you
To the extent the applicable law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, lost profit, lost bookings or business interruption arising from your use of the site or from a decision you took after reading something here. Nothing in this section limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else a publisher may not exclude.
If your use of the site causes a claim against us, meaning you posted something unlawful or infringing, scraped the site, or republished our work without permission, you cover the cost of dealing with it, including legal costs. That clause covers the few cases where a comment box is used to deliver a problem that becomes ours.
Losing access
We can suspend or block access for anybody breaking these terms, most often for automated harvesting and for accounts posting promotional links. Blocking is technical rather than ceremonial: an address goes on a list and the requests stop being answered. Commercial scraping gets no warning first.
If you think a block was a mistake, and a legitimate reader on a shared network can look exactly like a bad actor, write to support@worldhab.com and say what you were doing when it stopped working. We will read the logs and lift it if we got it wrong.
Law, and where a dispute goes
These terms are governed by the law applicable at the publisher’s place of business, and a dispute goes to the courts with jurisdiction there. We do not name a venue on a public page. If you need publisher details to serve a claim, write to the address above and we will provide what the notice requires.
Before any of that, try the email. Most of what arrives as a legal threat is a factual dispute our corrections process settles in an afternoon at no cost to either side. If a clause here is unenforceable where you live, the rest stands, and a right we do not enforce at once is not one we have given up.
Changes to these terms
We update this page when the site changes or the law does, and the date at the top moves when the substance does. A change affecting your rights gets a notice on the site rather than a silent edit, and using the site after that notice is how you accept the new version.
The current text is the one at this address, and there is no public archive of earlier versions, which we would rather say than imply. If a clause here contradicts what the site plainly does, tell us and we will fix the wording. Put “terms” in the subject line.
