Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Started/@comment-45.37.16.32-20160610004459/@comment-17725354-20161012163123

(Please note that I am not Wikia/Fandom staff and that this is not, in any way, an "official" response.)

I agree with you that it would at first seem like a catch-22 in that you can't read the terms that you are supposed to read in order to use Wikia without using Wikia. However, I believe that it is common practice to automatically accept the terms when you visit a site.

A few reasons I can think of for this:


 * 1) To protect intellectual property: As soon as you access the Wikia/Fandom site, a user* can see and could theorically copy the Wikia/Fandom logo and other content. Even if the site displayed a message prompting a user to accept the terms before he/she could actually "view" logos, etc., he/she might be able to bypass it through the browser's Inspect Element tool or some other workaround. I'm not a laywer and I can't say how well, "Well, I technically didn't accept the terms," would hold up in the court of law in a copyright case in the U.S. or other countries, but having users automatically accept the terms would avoid such a situation entirely.
 * 2) Liability: Since it's possible to get a virus from simply visiting a site, it's in the best interest of the company to protect itself from legal responsibility for any "damage" to your computer or other property as soon as you access the site.
 * 3) How would a company keep track of whether or not a user has accepted the terms so that they are not prompted to accept them every time they visit? A cookie would not be ideal because some users could be using browsers that do not preserve cookies, e.g. Chrome's Incognito Mode. That would mean a user would have to re-accept the terms every time they cleared their cookies or every time they opened a new Incognito session.
 * 4) User experience: Most** people don't read the terms. They probably should, but I think everyone has been in the situation where they just press "accept" and move on. Imagine having to accept the terms on every site you visit, even if you don't read them. This might not be much of a problem on sites you frequently visit if the company figured out a way so that you only had to accept the terms the very first time you accessed it. However, if you're searching for information and you are visiting many "new" sites (as in sites you have never accessed before), accepting the terms on each site could become a real pain. It would probably similar to how some sites prompt you to sign up for their newsletter when you first visit-- I find that it feels as if the site is "interrupting" me from getting to information like I was being interrupted in a conversation. At the minimum, I would be annoyed and might even lose my train of thought and be less likely to return.

*By "a user," I mean anyone accessing a site, with or without an account.

**A survey by SocialTimes says that 17.56% of respondents claim they "always" read the Terms of Service when signing up to a social network. (Source)