House rules

How we expect people to use and behave on the site

We have house rules to maintain a safe, legal, considerate, and productive environment to help you hold governments to account.

Also, if you break the rules it takes significant amounts of volunteer time to deal with and risks our ability to run the service.

Please keep to the rules.

• Use Right to Know only to request specific information, not for general correspondence with public authorities, and certainly not for correspondence about your own personal circumstances.
• Do not include potentially defamatory/potential libellous comments (such as allegations) in your requests and annotations.
• Do not post information that is unlawful, harassing, defamatory, abusive, threatening, harmful, obscene, discriminatory or profane.
• Do not use Right to Know to request your personal information from authorities. You should request this information directly from the authority.
• Keep messages sent via our service concise and tightly focused on the subject of the request for information. Heed our advice on making responsible and effective requests.
• Do not try to impersonate someone else.
• Do not use any language likely to offend in your requests and annotations.
• No spamming.
• Do not make vexatious requests (requests with no serious purpose, or which are intended to disrupt the operation of a public body). The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has published guidance on vexatious behaviour.
• Do not use our service to request other people’s personal information and do not include such information in requests, annotations or follow-ups.
• Do not try to evade the actions of site administrators by, for example, creating new accounts to evade a ban, or a rate-limiting cap, or by republishing material which you know has been removed by moderators.

What happens if you break these rules

If you break any of the rules there are a number of actions we may take. These include removing your request/annotation, or reminding you of our house rules. In more serious or repeated cases, we will likely suspend your account.

In some cases, breaking these rules could lead to legal action being taken against you by the authorities or an aggrieved party.