Terms of use

The plain rules for using Big Bear Ready. Reading the site, posting to it, or buying a listing means you accept them. They go together with the privacy page, which says what the site collects. If anything here is unclear, ask — the address is at the bottom.

The short version

This site gathers public information about Big Bear Valley in one place. It is not an emergency service, it is not always right, and it is never a substitute for an official order. Post honestly, use what you find here with judgement, and call 911 when something is happening.

Big Bear Ready is an independent, locally run site. It is not a government agency, a news organisation, or a public safety service, and nothing on it should be read as one.

This is not an emergency service

Nothing here is watched around the clock. Fire, road, power, weather, lake, scanner and incident information is pulled automatically from public sources. It can be delayed, incomplete, out of date or plainly wrong. Feeds break, sources change their formats, and a quiet page does not mean nothing is happening.

In an emergency, call 911. For evacuation orders and warnings, follow the San Bernardino County Sheriff, Big Bear Fire, CAL FIRE and the county’s official alert system. For road closures and chain controls, Caltrans is the authority. For power, the utility that serves you. If this site and an official source disagree, the official source is right.

Decisions about your safety, your property, your travel and your animals are yours. Big Bear Ready does not accept responsibility for what happens when this site is relied on instead of an official source.

Provided as is

Everything on this site is provided as is and as available, with no warranty of any kind — not of accuracy, completeness, timeliness, fitness for any purpose, or uninterrupted availability. Outside links, embedded feeds and third-party data are included for convenience and are not under this site’s control.

To the fullest extent California law allows, Big Bear Ready and the people who run it are not liable for any loss, injury or damage arising from using or being unable to use the site, from relying on anything on it, or from anything posted by other visitors. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid the site in the twelve months before the claim — which, for most visitors, is nothing.

Posting to the site

This covers lost & found pets, garage sales, jobs, photos, catch submissions and anything else a visitor sends in.

• You must be 18 or older to post or to pay for anything.
• Everything you post must be true — a real pet, a real sale, a real opening, a real catch — and must be yours to share. Boards that say no business promotion mean it.
• Not allowed: anything unlawful, harassing, threatening, discriminatory or sexually explicit; scams, spam and misleading offers; other people’s private information without their permission; anything that would put a person or an animal at risk.
• You keep ownership of what you post. You give Big Bear Ready a free, worldwide, non-exclusive permission to store, display, resize, crop and share it on the site and on the project’s own social accounts, with the credit you supplied or none if you asked for none. That permission ends when the post is removed, except for copies already shared or sitting in a backup.
• Everything is reviewed before it goes live, and anything can be edited, declined or taken down at any time, for any reason, without notice. The site is not obliged to publish anything.
• Contact details on a board are for that post only. Do not collect them, and do not use them for marketing.
• Dealings between people who meet through a board are between them. Big Bear Ready is not a party to any sale, hire, handover or reunion, and cannot vouch for anyone. Meet in a public place and use judgement.

Paid listings and advertising

• Paid tiers buy visibility in the business directory and nowhere else. Every paid placement is labelled Sponsored, Featured or Listed. Nothing can buy a place inside emergency alerts, incident reports or official road status, and no advertiser can edit or influence safety information. That rule is not for sale.
• Billing runs through Stripe on the schedule shown at checkout and renews automatically until cancelled. Cancel any time through the customer portal link emailed to you. The listing stays at its paid tier until the end of the period already paid for, then drops to the free tier. It is not removed.
• No refunds for a billing period already started, except where the law requires one, or where the site removes a listing for a reason other than a breach of these terms — then the unused part is refunded.
• If a payment fails, Stripe retries it. Once Stripe gives up, the listing drops to the free tier.
• You are responsible for your business details being accurate and lawful. Big Bear Ready can decline or remove any listing that is misleading, unsafe, discriminatory, exploitative or outside what the directory is for.

Other people’s sites and embedded feeds

Pages link out to agencies, resorts and businesses, and some embed feeds from other companies — Facebook page timelines, the Instagram photo wall, YouTube, live webcams, the Windy radar and OpenStreetMap map tiles. Those are under their owners’ terms and privacy policies, not these. Their presence is not an endorsement, and this site does not control what they show or how they behave.

Data shown from public agencies belongs to those agencies and is reproduced here as public information. Agency and business names and logos belong to their owners.

Using the site

The site is for personal and local use. Quoting or linking with credit is welcome. Scraping at volume, hammering the server, working around protections, or republishing the site’s compiled content as your own is not. Site text, design and code belong to Big Bear Ready unless credited otherwise; photos belong to the people who took them.

Any part of the site may be changed, paused or shut down at any time without notice.

Copyright and takedown

If something on this site uses your work without permission, email bigbearreadyhelp@inkboxmail.com with the link, what is yours, and how to reach you. It will be looked at promptly and removed if the complaint stands. The same address works for a post about you that you want taken down.

Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of California. Any dispute goes to the courts of San Bernardino County, California. If any part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still stands. These terms and the privacy page are the whole agreement between you and Big Bear Ready.

Changes to this page

This page is dated at the top. When the terms change, the date changes and the change is described here rather than quietly swapped in. Using the site after a change means accepting it.

Questions: bigbearreadyhelp@inkboxmail.com. Big Bear Ready is a small independent site for Big Bear Valley, not a company with a legal department, and it will answer like one.