mum. Spotlight contributor terms

Version: contributor-terms-v1 (date added when published)

Who this is for: you, a reviewer on the mum.com.au team, about to submit a mum. Spotlight review.

The short version

You used a product at home and you’re telling us what you honestly thought. We’ll turn your notes into an article in your words, published under your name, and nothing goes live until you’ve approved the exact version. The page will say plainly what the brand paid for. Brands pay for our team’s time, never for the verdict. By ticking the box, you let us publish what you write and upload, including your children where they appear in your photos, and you transfer ownership of it to us. That last part is a real transfer, so it has its own section below and it is worth reading. The detail is below, and it’s short. Please actually read it: some of it, like what we keep forever and why, matters.

Who’s agreeing to what

These terms are between you and Norris Gryg Pty Ltd (ABN 50 649 952 134), trading as mum.com.au. Where these terms say ”we”, ”us” or ”mum.com.au”, that is who they mean. They cover mum. Spotlight contributions only: the review you’re submitting through this form, and anything you upload for it. They don’t change anything else about how you work with us.

You tick these terms once per spotlight. If you review another product later, you’ll tick again, against whatever version of these terms is current then. The version you tick is the version that applies to that spotlight. If we change these terms, the change applies to what you submit afterwards, not to what you’ve already given us.

What we collect

When you use the review form, we collect:

• What you write. Your notes, your loved and would-change lists, who it’s perfect for, who should skip it, your pull quote, and any extras. The form saves as you type, so we hold what you’ve written even before you submit it. A copy of your draft also sits in your own browser until you submit, when it’s cleared.
• Your reviewer profile. Your name, email address, photo and a short bio line (like ”mum of two under four”). We hold these because a spotlight is published under your real name. Your email is used to send you your review link and to talk to you about your spotlight, and for nothing else.
• A record of this agreement. When you press submit, we record which version of these terms you accepted, the exact time, and the internet address (IP address) your submission came from. That record is our proof, and yours, that you agreed. More on how long we keep it below.
• Photos and video, when uploads are available. Photo upload isn’t built into the form yet. When it is, everything in the photos section below applies to what you upload.

What we publish

Your spotlight page shows your first name (or the name you’ve agreed with us), your photo, your bio line, and the review itself. Your name and photo also appear on the mum.com.au homepage when your spotlight is featured, on the Spotlight index, and on your own reviewer page listing your spotlights. Your name is also included in the structured data search engines read, as the review’s author. All of these pages are public and can appear in search results.

The page also carries a disclosure band, right at the top, stating what the brand’s arrangement was: paid for our time, supplied the product, both, or neither. That band is the point of the whole feature, and it’s locked in before your review link is even sent.

The AI step, honestly

We don’t hand your raw notes straight to the page. A language model drafts the article from your notes, in the first person, in your voice, under your name. A human on our team reviews and may edit the draft. Then you read it.

Nothing publishes until you approve the exact version that will go live. Part of that is built into the database and part of it is us keeping our word, and you should know which is which. What the database enforces: every draft version arrives unapproved, a version cannot be published unless it carries a recorded approval, and any edit to approved words creates a new version with the approval cleared, so the old approval cannot carry over to words you never saw. What we do by hand today: we send you the exact version and record your approval when you confirm it. A self-service approval screen is being built; until it exists, that step is a person on our team acting honestly, not a lock, and we would rather tell you that than let you assume otherwise.

The drafting pipeline is still being built, so today a human is more involved in assembling the draft. Either way, the approval rule above holds: your tick on a specific version is the only thing that can publish it.

Your verdict is yours

The verdict in your spotlight is your honest opinion of the product, and nobody can change it. Not the brand: brands pay for our team’s time and never see your review before you’ve approved it. Not us either: we can edit for clarity and house style, but every edit comes back to you, and if the draft doesn’t say what you actually think, don’t approve it. Tell us and we’ll fix it or scrap it.

In return, you’re promising us the review is real:

• You actually used the product, at home, for the period the page states.
• Everything in your notes is your genuine experience. Nothing invented, nothing exaggerated to be kind or to be harsh.
• If your view of the product changes after publication, tell us. We will look at it properly and usually update the spotlight, though taking one down is a decision we make case by case (see the takedown section).

Money, gifts and connections

The honesty of the disclosure band depends on you as much as on us:

• Take nothing from the brand directly. No payment, gifts, free products, commissions or discounts from the brand or its agencies, before or after publication, for this review or coverage connected to it. Everything flows through mum.com.au and gets disclosed on the page.
• Tell us about any connection to the brand before you start. If you or your family work for them, have worked for them, have an ambassador deal, or have been gifted by them before, we need to know before your review link is used, because the disclosure on the page is locked in early and it has to be true.
• Tell us if the brand contacts you, at any point, about this spotlight.
• Don’t post your own undisclosed content about the product that trades on the spotlight. Your own social posts about it need the same honesty the page has.

If any of this turns out not to be true, we can take the spotlight down.

What you get for doing this is whatever we agreed with you before this spotlight started: payment, keeping the product, or something else. It is agreed per spotlight and it sits outside these terms, so nothing here changes it.

Photos, and children specifically

You choose what to upload. Photos that show hands and the product, rather than faces, are what we prefer and what works best on the page.

If your children appear in your photos, here’s exactly how it works:

• A child’s face is never used in a featured spot without your explicit OK for that specific photo. Featured spots means the cover image at the top of the article, the preview image social media and messaging apps show when the page is shared, the homepage, and the cards on our Spotlight listing pages and your own reviewer page. The system treats every photo as showing a face until someone confirms otherwise, and the answer to ”may this face be featured?” is no by default. Only your explicit yes, per photo, changes it.
• Photos without that OK can still appear as small images inside the article itself. That’s the one place they’re allowed, and they can’t be promoted into the cover slot. So if you don’t want a photo of your child anywhere at all, don’t upload it, or tell us and we’ll remove it.
• By ticking these terms you’re consenting, as their parent, to your children appearing in what you upload, on the terms above.

Taking an image down later. Ask us, any time, via our contact page, and we’ll remove the photo from the site and delete it from our storage. Two honest limits: our pages are cached, so a removed image can take up to about a week to disappear everywhere on our site, and copies already made by other people or platforms (for example, a social network that stored the preview image) are outside our control. We’ll act promptly; we can’t promise the internet forgets.

When your child is old enough to have a view, we’ll treat a request from them the same as a request from you.

The rights you give us

Plainly: the writing and photos you submit for a spotlight become ours. We need to be able to publish, edit, crop, brighten and keep them online, on this site and where the site’s content normally appears (search results, social previews, our newsletter), and to keep the records described below even after a spotlight comes down.

You transfer ownership to us. You assign to Norris Gryg Pty Ltd, trading as mum.com.au, all your right, title and interest, including copyright, in everything you submit for this spotlight: your notes and answers, the photos you upload, and the article created from them. The assignment takes effect as you submit, worldwide, for the full term of copyright, and it is ours to use, edit, publish, license on to others and keep.

What you keep. Your own family photographs are still yours to use in your own life: printing them, sharing them with family, putting them on your own social accounts. Nothing here stops you doing any of that with your own pictures of your own children. What you have transferred is our ability to publish them here without having to come back and ask.

What that means if you later want something taken down. Because the material is ours, and because a brand has usually paid for the work by the time it is live, we do not promise to take a published spotlight down on request. We will always consider it, and we will talk to you about it, but the answer may be no.

The one thing that is not like that: a photograph showing your child. If you ask us to remove a photo that shows one of your children, we remove it, without needing a reason and without weighing it against anything else. That holds whether or not you ticked it for featured use, and it holds after publication. We are keeping that promise unconditional because your consent to your child appearing here is only real if you can take it back, and we would rather lose a photograph than hold one a parent no longer wants published.

Moral rights. Australian law gives you moral rights in what you create: to be credited, and not to have your work treated in a way that hurts your reputation. You can’t sign those away, but you can consent to specific things. For this spotlight, you consent to: our editing and enhancement of your photos as described above; the article, drafted from your notes with our edits and your approval, being published under your name as its author; and your material appearing without a credit where a layout genuinely can’t carry one.

What we keep, and what we can’t erase

This is the part most terms bury. We won’t.

If you never submit, nothing is sealed. A half-written draft is just held for you, so you can come back to it. Ask us and we will delete it outright, with nothing kept.

Once you submit, your submission is sealed. Your notes as you submitted them, plus the record of your acceptance (the terms version, the time, the IP address), can never be edited or deleted, by anyone, including us. The database refuses. The same goes for every version of the draft: drafts are an append-only history and can’t be deleted.

Why it works that way: the sealed submission and the draft history are the receipt that your published review says what you actually said, that you approved what actually went out, and that the disclosure on the page was true. A takedown is better evidenced with that record intact than without it. If we could quietly edit your notes after the fact, your protection would be gone along with ours.

What can be removed, for real:

• Any photo or video: the record is deletable and we delete the files from our storage. (Removing the copies our website serves is a manual step today, and we do it as part of the same request.)
• The published article: we can unpublish it, and it comes off the homepage, the indexes and your reviewer page.
• Your profile photo and bio line: these can be updated or replaced any time. Your name stays on the record of spotlights you published while they were up.

What can’t be removed: the sealed submission, the consent record including the IP address, and the draft history. If you ask us to ”delete everything”, that’s the honest boundary of what we can do, and now you know it before you tick, not after.

If you leave the team

Published spotlights stay published, under your name, with your photo and bio as they were. You can ask us to take one down and we will consider it, as above. You can always ask us to update your photo and bio, and you can always have images of your children removed.

Withdrawing, and taking a spotlight down

Photos of your children: yes, always. Ask via our contact page, no reason needed, and we remove the photo from the site and delete it from our storage. Two honest limits: our pages are cached, so it can take up to about a week to disappear everywhere on our site, and copies already made by other people or platforms are outside our control.

The spotlight itself: ask, and we will consider it. A published spotlight is ours, and a brand has usually paid for the work behind it, so we do not promise to take one down on request. Tell us why and we will genuinely weigh it, and if we agree we unpublish it and it comes off the homepage and the indexes. If your view of the product has changed, or something in it has become wrong or unfair to you, say so, because those are the reasons that carry the most weight with us. What we will not do is pretend the answer is automatic when it is not.

If we do unpublish, what remains afterwards is the sealed record described above, which stops being public but doesn’t stop existing.

If these terms change

Each version of these terms has its own version number and its own permanent page. A new version never applies backwards to something you already submitted. If the terms change while your form is open, the form will ask you to read the new version and tick again before it will submit; your writing is safe the whole time.

Contact, privacy and the boring essentials

Questions, takedowns, corrections, complaints: our contact page, any time. How we handle your personal information, and your children’s, is covered by our privacy policy, which has a section on Spotlight.

These terms are governed by Australian law. If part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands. These terms plus your submission form are the whole agreement for this spotlight.

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