How to inform users of changes to your site's terms and conditions

Not essential for GDPR, but important for users' awareness of how you handle their data; you can alert users to changes to your site terms and conditions.

How it works

When you update your terms and conditions and want to tell users about it, you can choose to set an effective date for your site T&Cs. To do this, head to the cog in the top right-hand corner of the page and click Settings. Scroll down until you find the 'Registration Settings' tile.

On this page, you will find the T&Cs effective date selector.

When a user visits your site and the effective date is later than the date on which they last accepted your terms and conditions (usually the date on which they registered for your network), they will be shown a popover modal on whatever page they first try to sign in from on your site. They will not be able to proceed until they have accepted the updated terms.

(Note that if you make changes to your terms and conditions page, this will not automatically trigger the modal. It will only be triggered if you update the date on the Settings > Registrations page.)

To recap the process:

1. You update the terms and conditions page on your site
2. If the change warrants asking your users to accept your new T&Cs, you go to the Settings > Registrations page and set a new terms and conditions effective date
3. Any user that has not accepted these updated terms sees a popover modal asking them to accept them, the next time they sign in to the site 
4. When they do, the 'terms accepted date' stored against their user data is updated