Terms of Service

1. About these terms

This website is published by Saint Mary and Saint Marina Coptic Orthodox Church (“the parish”, “we”, “our” or “us”) of 363 Ninth Avenue, Llandilo NSW 2747. These Terms apply to your use of the website at stmaryandstmarina.com.au.

By using the website you accept these Terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the website. You are always welcome to contact the parish by telephone, by post, or in person instead.

These Terms cover this website only. They do not govern your membership of the parish, your participation in services, sacraments, ministries or events, or any pastoral relationship. Those are matters of church life, not of website usage.

2. What this website is, and what it is not

This is an informational website for our parish. It publishes service times, information about the Coptic Orthodox faith, our history, our priests, our ministries, a photograph gallery, and ways to get in touch.

So that there is no confusion about what you are agreeing to, the following is stated plainly:

• There are no public accounts. You cannot register, create a login or hold an account on this website. The only accounts that exist belong to parish staff and volunteers and are created by an administrator.
• The website does not process payments. It has no shopping cart, no checkout and no card form, and it never asks for card or bank details. See section 6 for how donations work.
• There is no e-commerce, and there are no subscriptions or paid services. Nothing on this website is for sale.
• There is no event registration or booking. The website does not take bookings for services, events or programs.
• Nothing you submit is published on the website. Enquiries and feedback are stored privately and are readable only by signing in. They do not appear on any public page and are not indexed by search engines.

The only things you can do here as a member of the public are read the pages, and use the three forms described in section 4.

3. Using this website

You may read, print and share the pages of this website for personal, devotional, educational or parish purposes.

We ask that you do not:

• Use the website for any unlawful purpose, or in breach of any applicable Australian law.
• Send material through our forms that is abusive, threatening, harassing, defamatory, obscene, or that vilifies any person or group.
• Impersonate the parish, a member of the clergy, a member of staff or a volunteer, or any other person, or submit another person’s contact details as your own.
• Use our forms to send advertising, promotional material, chain messages or bulk unsolicited mail.
• Attempt to gain access to any part of the website, its administration screens or its stored records that is not made available to the public.
• Introduce any virus or malicious code, or attempt to interfere with, overload or disrupt the website or the server it runs on.
• Use automated means to scrape, harvest or copy the website’s content or the personal details published on it, including for the purpose of building a mailing list.

This is a church website intended for a general audience. It does not verify anyone’s age. If you are under 18, please have a parent or guardian’s permission before sending us your contact details through a form.

4. Our online forms

The website has three forms open to the public. What each of them does with your information is described in our Privacy Policy. What follows is what you are agreeing to when you use them.

4.1 Contact form

Our contact form asks for your name, your email address, your telephone number if you wish to give one, and your message. Your enquiry is given a reference number and is saved before any notification email is sent, so that a mail failure cannot lose it.

Please keep in mind that the form is read by people, not by an automated service. We aim to respond, but we cannot guarantee a reply or a response time, and the form is not monitored continuously. Do not use this form for anything urgent, and never use it to report an emergency or a situation where someone is at risk of harm. In an emergency in Australia, call 000.

4.2 Suggestions and complaints

Our suggestions and complaints form lets you raise a suggestion or a concern with the parish. It records the type of submission, a category, a subject line and your message, and gives you a reference number.

You may submit it anonymously. If you tick that option we do not ask who you are, and the submission is marked as anonymous when it is read. If you would like a reply you will need to give us a way to reach you.

Submissions are confidential to those in the parish who handle them. They are not published on the website. Submitting one does not by itself commit the parish to any particular action or outcome, and the parish decides how to respond.

4.3 Newsletter

Our sign-up form asks only for your email address, and adds it to the parish mailing list. Please subscribe only your own address, and not somebody else’s.

You can stop receiving our messages at any time. Every message we send carries an unsubscribe link, and you can also use our unsubscribe page. There is no charge for the newsletter, and we do not sell, rent or trade the mailing list.

4.4 Spam protection and submission limits

Our forms are protected by Google reCAPTCHA. It does not ask you to solve a puzzle, but it does mean Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply to that check. A submission that scores poorly is held for a person to review rather than being passed straight through.

Each form also accepts only a limited number of submissions from the same visitor in an hour, currently five. If you reach that limit the form will ask you to try again later. This is to stop automated abuse, and is not a judgement about you.

5. Content and copyright

The text, photographs, artwork, logos and design of this website belong to the parish or to the people who licensed them to us, and are protected by copyright.

You may freely read, print, download and share our pages for personal, devotional, educational or parish use, and quote from them with attribution. Please ask us first before republishing our material commercially, altering it, or presenting it as your own.

Some material reproduced on this website, including scriptural, liturgical and patristic texts, hymns and translations, belongs to others and is used with permission or under licence. Our permission does not extend to that material.

If you believe something on this website infringes your copyright, or if a photograph of you or your child appears in our gallery and you would like it removed, please contact us using the details in section 13 and we will attend to it.

6. Donations

This website does not accept donations and does not process payments. Our donations page publishes the parish’s bank account details so that you can make a transfer yourself, through your own bank. That transfer happens entirely outside this website, and is subject to your own bank’s terms, not ours.

We never ask for card details, bank passwords or one-time codes, and we will never email you asking you to pay through a link. Please treat any message claiming otherwise as suspicious, and contact the parish office directly to check.

Donations support the life and work of the parish. Because the transfer is made through your bank, we do not automatically know who has given, and a receipt is not issued automatically. The donations page explains which donations are tax deductible and how to request a receipt. Any question about a donation, including a mistaken or duplicated transfer, should be raised with the parish office directly.

7. Links, embedded content and our app

Our contact page embeds a Google Map showing where the church is, and our home page embeds a YouTube video player. Our pages also link to our social media profiles. These are run by other organisations, under their own terms and privacy policies. We do not control them and are not responsible for their content, and a link is not an endorsement.

The website is hosted, and our email is delivered, by Hostinger.

8. Availability and accuracy

We take care to keep this website accurate and available, but it is provided as it is. We do not promise that it will always be online, that it will be free of faults, or that it will be uninterrupted. We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of it, and we may change service times or other published details, without notice.

Service times, events and other details can change at short notice. If something matters, please confirm it with the parish office before relying on it.

Information published here is general in nature. It is not legal, financial, medical or professional advice, and it does not replace pastoral guidance from a priest.

9. Our responsibility to you

Nothing in these Terms excludes, restricts or modifies any consumer guarantee, right or remedy that the Australian Consumer Law or any other law gives you and that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Subject to that, and to the extent the law allows, the parish is not liable for loss or damage arising from your use of this website or from your reliance on information published on it, including where a page was unavailable, out of date or incorrect.

10. If these Terms are not kept

Because this website has no public accounts, there is nothing for us to suspend or close. What we can do, and may do, is decline to act on a submission, remove material that should not have been sent to us, and take reasonable technical steps to block access where that is necessary to protect the website, the parish or our community. Where conduct is unlawful or someone is at risk, we may report it to the police or to the relevant authority.

11. Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains what personal information we collect through this website, how it is used and stored, and how you can ask to see it, correct it or have it deleted. It forms part of these Terms.

12. Changes to these Terms, and governing law

We may update these Terms from time to time, for example if the website changes. The current version is always the one published on this page, and the date it was last updated is shown at the top. Please look at it again from time to time.

These Terms are governed by the laws of New South Wales, Australia.

13. Contact us

If you have a question about these Terms, please contact the Church Secretary through our contact page, by email at info@stmaryandstmarina.com.au, or by post at 363 Ninth Avenue, Llandilo NSW 2747.