Connecting the Connected — Membership Terms

Version: 1.0 · Effective date: 12 October 2026

1. About these terms

1.1 These terms are an agreement between you and THE YARD (MANCHESTER) LTD, which operates Connecting the Connected ("CTC", "we", "us"). They explain how you join CTC, what we provide, what we expect of you, what we may do with what you post, and what happens when a membership ends.

1.2 Three other documents sit beside these terms:

• The Code of Conduct sets out how members must behave. It forms part of these terms (section 5).
• The Reporting and Complaints Procedure explains how to report a concern, how we handle it, and how to ask us to review a decision. It forms part of these terms (section 6).
• The Privacy Notice explains how we use personal information. It is not part of these terms, and accepting these terms does not mean you agree to it. Your rights over your information come from data protection law, not from these terms, and they continue whether or not you are a member.

1.3 You will be asked to accept these terms in CTC, and we will record which version you accepted and when. If we change these terms in a way that affects what you agree to, we will tell members what has changed and when it takes effect, and ask you to accept the new version. Updating a date on this page does not, by itself, mean you have accepted a change.

1.4 These terms take effect on 12 October 2026.

2. Who we are

2.1 CTC is operated by THE YARD (MANCHESTER) LTD, company number 02957706, registered office 11 Bent Street, Manchester, England, M8 8NF.

2.2 Gabriel Hamburger administers CTC on behalf of the company.

2.3 You can contact us at contact@connectingtheconnected.com about anything in these terms. You do not need to be a member or to sign in.

3. Joining CTC

3.1 CTC is a private, invitation-only network for creative professionals. You must be 18 or over to be a member.

3.2 You join in three steps:

1. You ask for an invitation. We send invitations only to people who have asked for one. Members cannot invite anyone to join CTC. An administrator decides whom to invite.
2. You accept the invitation. The invitation email gives you a code and says when it expires. You join with the email address the invitation was sent to, the code, and your first and last name. We then email you a one-time sign-in code; CTC has no passwords.
3. An administrator reviews your membership. Until then, your membership is awaiting approval: you can sign in and set up your own profile, but no other member apart from administrators can see it. An administrator then approves or declines your membership. If you are approved, we email you, and you can also check on the page you see after signing in.

3.3 Being invited, or approved, is a decision about membership. It is not a check or a guarantee of anyone's identity, qualifications, work or conduct, including yours, and members should not treat it as one.

4. What CTC provides

4.1 As a member you can have a profile that other members can see and find in the member directory; connect with other members and exchange private messages with your connections; write posts, comments and reactions and share images; and create and join groups. "All CTC members" means every current member of CTC. It never means the public internet: CTC has no public profile, directory or post pages, and only a signed-in member can see what is on CTC. There is one exception, for images. To show an image, CTC gives the viewing member's device a link to it that works for up to 15 minutes, and anyone who has that link can open the image during that time without signing in.

4.2 Membership is currently free. If CTC ever charges for membership or for any part of CTC, we will tell members at least 30 days before any charge begins, and you will not have to pay anything unless you have first agreed to that charge separately. Accepting these terms is not agreeing to a charge.

4.3 We work to keep CTC running and secure, but we cannot promise that it will always be available, uninterrupted or free of faults. We may change, add or remove features. Before we remove a feature, or change one in a way that affects how you use CTC, we will tell members at least 14 days in advance what is changing and why. If you do not want to continue, you can end your membership, as section 8.1 explains.

4.4 If we decide to close CTC, or to withdraw one of its main features, we will tell members at least 30 days in advance, and why. You can end your membership before then, as section 8.1 explains. What happens to your information in that case is covered by the Privacy Notice and by your data protection rights. There is one exception to the advance notice in sections 4.3 and 4.4: if we must act urgently to protect someone's safety, or, for a change under section 4.3, to keep CTC secure, we may make the change first, and then tell members what we did and why as soon as we can.

4.5 If you need help, or something is not working, contact us at the address in section 2.3. If you can no longer use CTC after signing in, the page you see has a contact form that reaches us.

5. How members behave

5.1 You must follow the Code of Conduct. It is part of these terms. It sets out what we expect of every member, how we respond when those expectations are not met, and how the rules change.

6. Moderation, and how a membership can be ended by us

6.1 How we handle reports and complaints, how we decide what to do, and how you can ask us to review a decision are set out in the Code of Conduct and the Reporting and Complaints Procedure. Those two documents are part of these terms, and this section does not repeat them.

6.2 In short: the responses available to us are the ones those documents list, which include removing a post or comment and ending a membership. CTC has no temporary-suspension feature. You can ask us to review any decision about your content or membership, as the Procedure explains, whether or not you are still a member.

7. Your content

7.1 You keep the rights you own in what you create and share on CTC. Posting it on CTC does not give us ownership of those rights.

7.2 So that CTC can work, you give THE YARD (MANCHESTER) LTD permission to store, back up and copy your posts, comments, reactions, images, profile, and group names and descriptions, and to show them to current CTC members as follows:

• your profile, including your name and your entry in the member directory: to every current member;
• the name and description of a group you own: to every current member, including for a group set to "Members only";
• a post, with its comments, reactions and images: to the audience the post had when it was made, which is every current member, or the members of a group set to "Members only". CTC administrators can view those posts and their comments, reactions and images for moderation even when they do not belong to the group;
• an image: also through the time-limited links described in section 4.1.

The permission includes the technical changes CTC makes to run the service, such as resizing and re-encoding images and removing the location, camera and date information embedded in them.

7.3 For private messages, the permission is narrower: to store your messages and deliver them to the other person in the conversation. It also covers keeping them in our backups, using them where needed to keep CTC secure, using them to answer a request made under data protection law, and disclosing them where the law requires us to.

7.4 The permission is:

• not exclusive: you can use your work anywhere else, in any way you choose;
• free of charge: we pay nothing for it, and you pay nothing for it;
• only for running CTC: we will not use your content to advertise or promote CTC, or publish it anywhere outside CTC (image links are covered in section 4.1). If we ever want to, we will ask you about that item first;
• shared only with the companies that run CTC for us, such as our hosting and database providers, and only so that they can do that. The Privacy Notice names them.

7.5 We do not ask you to give up your right to be named as the author of your work.

7.6 You must only share material you are entitled to share, as the Code of Conduct explains.

7.7 Other members can see what you share with them, and CTC cannot technically stop someone saving or copying what they can see. The Code of Conduct forbids members from republishing another member's work, photographs, biography or contact information outside CTC without permission or another lawful entitlement, and from collecting member information in bulk. If this happens, you can report it under the Reporting and Complaints Procedure. We cannot control copies made outside CTC.

7.8 You can delete your own posts and comments at any time. Deleting a post also deletes its images, comments and reactions. After you delete something, our permission to show it ends; a copy can stay in our backups for a short time, as the Privacy Notice explains.

8. When a membership ends

8.1 How a membership ends. There is no button to close your own account. To end your membership, email contact@connectingtheconnected.com. We may also end a membership under section 6.

8.2 What happens when a membership ends. Straight away:

• your profile, your entry in the member directory and your creative identity stop being shown to other members;
• your posts, with their images and with every comment and reaction on them, including other members'; your comments and reactions on other members' posts; your memberships of groups; the records of changes to a group's setting and ownership that you made or that name you; your requests to join groups; invitations to join a group that you sent or received; and the notifications your activity created are hidden from other members. A group's member count still counts you;
• groups you own are hidden from every other member, including the group's own members. CTC intends that, within 90 days, ownership passes to a current member or the group is deleted. Neither route is built, so this is an intention, not a promised deadline; hiding does not transfer or delete the group. Hiding the group does not itself hide posts by current members in it or their membership records;
• you can no longer use CTC or read your conversations.

8.3 Who can still see it. CTC administrators can still see the hidden records through CTC, apart from the notifications your activity created. An administrator can see requests and invitations to join a group only if they own or administer that group. Two limits apply to other members: an image link already given to a member's device can keep working for up to 15 minutes (section 4.1), and a page a member already has open keeps showing what it had loaded until it loads again. Private messages and connections are not hidden: the other person in a conversation keeps the full message history and the record of the connection, as the Privacy Notice explains.

8.4 Ending a membership does not delete your information. Hiding content is not deleting it. If your membership is restored, everything hidden is shown again. Deleting your information is a separate request under data protection law, and the Privacy Notice explains how to make it. A separate deletion of your account can also delete a group you own. Your data protection rights continue after your membership ends.

8.5 After your membership ends, the permission in section 7 continues as needed to store your content and keep it in backups until it is deleted as the Privacy Notice describes; to let administrators see hidden content within the limits in section 8.3; to show hidden content again if your membership is restored; and to keep the other person in a private conversation able to read its full message history. The uses of private messages listed in section 7.3 also continue where needed. We do not newly show content hidden under section 8.2 to other members, apart from the image links and pages already open described in section 8.3.

9. Not used in this version

10. Not used in this version

11. Contact

11.1 Questions about these terms, requests to end your membership, and reports and complaints all go to contact@connectingtheconnected.com.