Terms and Conditions

1. Service and eligibility

• RunIPS is an unofficial, non-commercial guide for Waseda University IPS students. It currently provides research-supervisor and laboratory reviews, a Community, and a Travel Guide that searches flights into FUK or KKJ. It does not represent Waseda University; course reviews and airport-to-campus transport are separate future features.
• You must be at least 18 and legally able to accept these terms. A supervisor review must come from your own first-hand research experience with the supervisor or laboratory. A Community contribution must be a question, experience, or material that you have the right to share.
• The site is for information only. It is not a university decision, professional advice, or a factual adjudication.

2. Accounts and acceptable use

• Each account may keep one review per supervisor. Do not submit for another person, manipulate ratings or votes, manufacture duplicate topics, report maliciously, or create accounts to evade a restriction.
• Protect your session. Clearing browser data or losing an anonymous session may remove your ability to edit. You can erase the account while you can still access it.
• Do not probe or bypass access controls, abuse an API through automation, extract non-public data, disrupt the service, distribute malicious code, or try to identify an anonymous reviewer.

3. Contribution rules

• A supervisor review must focus on supervision, feedback, research autonomy, laboratory culture, available support, and your genuine experience. Prefer observable conduct or patterns.
• A Community contribution must use a clear title and suitable category. Check similar topics before posting and provide information that is as accurate, relevant, and verifiable as reasonably possible. Do not use a topic or reply as a private message.
• Do not submit false or misleading material, unverified serious allegations, personal attacks, threats, harassment, hateful or discriminatory content, appearance comments, unlawful material, advertising, or spam.
• Do not disclose your own or another person’s name, student number, contact details, health data, exact movements, unpublished research, account credentials, confidential information, or private-chat text. Do not copy a group chat, email, or direct message unless you have the right to submit it and doing so does not infringe another person’s rights.
• If a group-chat knowledge project is introduced later, RunIPS will publish only anonymised, rewritten Q&A that has passed human review after restricted, short-term private staging, never raw chat or sender identifiers. The processing detail will be published in the Privacy Notice before launch; this term does not mean that the feature is already available.
• Each context field requires an active choice, including “Not disclosed”. A written comment is entirely optional and may contain 0–2,000 characters.

4. Content rights and licence

You retain rights in your original content. You grant RunIPS a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence, sublicensable only to processors needed to operate the service, to host, copy, format, translate, publicly display, back up, and moderate your contribution. The licence is limited to providing, securing, and improving RunIPS. It ends when the content is deleted, except to the extent needed for controlled backup rotation or a non-excludable legal duty. You warrant that you have the right to submit the content.

5. Moderation, reports, and content requests

We may, but need not, review content before publication. To enforce these rules, protect privacy, handle a report, or reduce legal and security risk, we may hide content, redact sensitive detail, reject or remove a contribution, restrict an abusive account, or mark a Community topic resolved, duplicate, closed, or locked. A status or accepted reply is not a factual endorsement by RunIPS. A student, reviewed person, Community participant, or third party may use the page-reporting feature or Contact to raise a content concern. We consider first-hand experience, public interest, privacy, and expression, but cannot promise that every decision will be error-free.

6. Privacy, erasure, and termination

• Public reviews omit internal account details; Community topics and replies are public content. Public anonymity is not a promise that identification is impossible. See the Privacy Notice for processing, GDPR lawful bases, international hosting, retention, and rights.
• You can permanently erase the account and all linked live personal data on the Account and data page. Your Community contributions lose their user content and author link. Where another user’s reply requires the thread structure to remain, a deleted placeholder with none of your content or identity may remain. Erasure cannot be undone; residual backups expire within the 14-day rotation.
• You may stop using the service. We may suspend or terminate an account for security, illegality, or serious or repeated breach, with reasons and a practicable appeal route where applicable law requires them. Data-protection rights survive termination.

7. Availability, third-party links, and liability

Reviews are contributors’ subjective experiences, while Community topics and replies are supplied by participants; neither is a factual finding by RunIPS. We do not guarantee completeness, accuracy, or continuous availability. Do not use RunIPS as the sole basis for choosing a supervisor, completing an administrative process, or resolving an academic dispute. Third-party links, including Google Scholar, are governed by their own terms.

Travel Guide flights, times, availability, and prices are indexed results returned by SerpApi from Google Flights; they are not a quote, reservation, or availability guarantee by RunIPS, Google, SerpApi, or an airline. Details can change at any time and must be checked with the airline or ticket seller before payment. Google Flights and ITA Matrix are external services, and ITA Matrix does not sell tickets; their respective terms and privacy policies apply. The transit-document module is a screening prompt, not immigration, visa, or legal advice.

To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, RunIPS is provided as is and is not responsible for indirect loss that was not reasonably foreseeable. Nothing here excludes fraud, wilful misconduct, gross negligence, death or personal injury, or any consumer, data-protection, or other right that the law does not allow us to exclude.

8. Changes, governing law, and contact

For a material change, we will update the date and give reasonable notice before the new terms take effect. A change will not retrospectively remove accrued rights. Subject to mandatory consumer and data-protection rules, these terms are governed by Japanese law and disputes go to a court with lawful jurisdiction. Use Contact for rules, removal, privacy, or any other concern.