Changes to accounts, names and transparency

As we continue along the path of improvements to Empire Avenue, we see the importance of your account profiles reflecting who you are legitimately on Empire Avenue, whether you are an individual or a business. Please read the following carefully as it may affect you.

Our Terms of Service

The Terms of Service you agreed to when creating your account have always indicated the following... that you shall agree:

• (a) to provide true, accurate, current and complete information about yourself as requested

• (b) to promptly update this information as required to keep it true, accurate, current and complete and

• (c) Empire Avenue reserves the right to remove any such information that you provide at its discretion. If any information provided by you is untrue, inaccurate, not current or incomplete, and/or you fail to comply with the Terms and Conditions and/or any Rules and /or Policy(ies), Empire Avenue reserves the right to terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Services.

If you are not familiar with our Terms of Service, please make sure to read them and adjust your use of Empire Avenue accordingly.

“Business” and “Personal” Accounts

We will clarify what is a “Business” and “Personal” accounts. A “Personal” account is one owned by an individual, and as per our Terms they should be under their real name. Any attached social media should match that name and persona. For example, Duleepa Wijayawardhana should have connections to his Twitter and Facebook.

A “Business” account is an account for an entity, item, corporation, business, group or project represented by an individual, group, sole proprietor, and/or management company, and acting within the context of the “Business” activities. This account will still be required to enter who is managing that account on Empire Avenue, however, we will only show the name of the entity. Attached social media should match the displayed entity. For example, Nokia should have connections to Nokia’s Twitter and Facebook.

EDIT: The above is not to say that you cannot attach personal social media to Business and vice versa for Personal  (this might happen if your business is secondary or you are the sole proprietor), however, we may seek clarification that you do want to be perceived in that vein and that you are the owner of both business and personal.

As per our Terms, you may have multiple accounts. Where, in our judgement, those accounts are created for the purpose of undermining or manipulating the normal processes of the site, including transferring eaves, gaming Share Prices, misleading or harassing others, etc. will be considered violations of the Terms and all accounts from that individual may be removed at our discretion.

• We will be changing our signup processes this week so that new accounts can choose between Business and Personal accounts from the start.

• New accounts will have 10 days to switch over between Business and Personal accounts.

• Existing accounts will have the opportunity to switch between Personal and Business account status between now and August 1st, 2013.

• We will also be informing existing accounts that require new information to be updated at their discretion.

• Switching between Business and Personal accounts will be disabled for existing accounts after August 1st, 2013.

• We will no longer accept switching between Business and Personal accounts via Support.

Your Name

In the past, we allowed you to have any character in your name so people could have full names like "Dups [TEAM DUPS] @dups". A few months ago we disabled the ability to have your name field contain special characters and we will now enforce that throughout the site.

• On Wednesday July 24th your name will be updated to remove any special characters.

• We will also change the name field have a character limit of 50 characters.

Your Usernames (Tickers)

Starting Wednesday July 24th, you will no longer be able to change your username (ticker). For new accounts you will be able to change your username within the first 3 days (EDITED). Thank you to the Community for noticing that allowing unfettered changing of usernames to be a problem. In this we are following the lead of services such as Facebook. Your username is an important part of your account, including how you may login to the service.

Changes to accounts, such as connections, name changes etc.

Unlike a service like Twitter, we really want to inform those who invest in you when something changes on your account, including but not limited to, change in connections such as external networks, name changes, username changes and other relevant information.

While we do not have all the details yet, we do record all these changes and we wish to find a way for you to see what has changed in the accounts you invest in on Empire Avenue. Again thank you to the Community for this suggestion, we will have more on this in the future.

Transferring Accounts

You cannot transfer accounts without our written permission. You cannot sell, barter or trade accounts. Should we suspect this is the case, we will suspend, contact and ultimately delete any accounts.

Handling of Suspended Accounts

Accounts which have been suspended for any suspected violation of our Terms, may be deleted at our discretion if the individual does not contact us within three days. It may take up to three weeks or more to review any information submitted regarding a suspended account and for us to reverse any decisions.

Please discuss the contents of this post here.