Terms of Use | RationalSurvivor.com

1. Acceptance of These Terms

By loading any page on rationalsurvivor.com, subscribing to the newsletter, submitting a comment, or contacting us about our testing, you agree to these Terms of Use as written on the day you use the site. If you do not agree with any part of them, the remedy is simple: stop using the site.

These terms form the whole agreement between you and Rational Survivor regarding your use of the site, together with the Privacy Policy, the Disclaimer, the Affiliate Disclosure and the Editorial Standards page, each of which is incorporated here by reference. Where a specific page sets stricter conditions — for example a downloadable checklist with its own usage note — that stricter condition applies to that material.

If you are using the site on behalf of an organisation, a school, a fire department, a scout group or an employer, you confirm you have authority to accept these terms for that organisation.

2. Licence to Use Our Content

You may use rationalsurvivor.com for your own preparedness, training and household planning, at no cost and without asking us. Specifically, you may:

Read, print and save our guides and checklists for personal or family use.
Print our checklists and hand them to members of your household, your hiking group, your CERT team, your classroom or your crew, provided the pages are reproduced whole and the rationalsurvivor.com attribution stays on them.
Quote a short extract — as a rule of thumb, a few sentences — in an article, forum post, video or presentation, with a visible credit to Rational Survivor and a working link back to the page you took it from.
Link to any page here from anywhere, without permission, including deep links to individual guides.

This licence is personal, non-exclusive, revocable and non-transferable. It does not include republishing our articles in full, scraping the site into a dataset or content farm, using our text or images to train or fine-tune a machine-learning model, reselling our checklists, or reproducing our photographs and test data in a commercial product. For any of those, ask first — write to hello@rationalsurvivors.com and describe what you want to use and where. We say yes to more requests than people expect, particularly from volunteer emergency organisations and educators.

3. Intellectual Property

Unless a page states otherwise, everything on rationalsurvivor.com is owned by Rational Survivor or licensed to us: the article text, the headings and structure of our guides, the photographs taken during testing, the diagrams, the recorded measurements and burn times, the review scoring framework described on How We Test, and the Rational Survivor name, wordmark and logo. These are protected by copyright and trade mark law.

Our test results deserve a specific note. When we publish a figure — a stove's boil time at a stated temperature, a filter's flow rate after a stated volume, the runtime a headlamp held before dropping below a stated output — that number is the product of our own testing work. You are welcome to cite it with attribution. You may not present it as your own testing, strip the stated conditions that make it meaningful, or reproduce a table of our results as the substance of your own review.

Some material on the site belongs to others and is used under licence or fair-dealing principles: manufacturer product photography, quotations from published research, and figures reproduced from public agency guidance such as Ready.gov or the EPA. Those remain the property of their owners, and our licence to you does not extend to them.

If you believe something we have published infringes your copyright, contact us at hello@rationalsurvivors.com with the URL, a description of the work, and enough detail for us to identify it. We investigate promptly and will remove or correct material where the claim is substantiated.

4. User Submissions and Comments

Comments, corrections, test reports from readers, photographs sent to us, and messages through the contact page are collectively "submissions". We read them. A meaningful share of our corrections come from readers who have used a piece of gear longer or harder than we have.

By sending us a submission you confirm:

The content is yours to send, and does not infringe anyone's copyright, privacy or contract.
Any factual claim you make — a failure you experienced, a measurement you took, a technique you used — is stated honestly, with the conditions it happened in, to the best of your knowledge.
You are not being paid by a brand, retailer or PR agency to post it. Undisclosed commercial comments are removed without notice.

You keep ownership of what you submit. You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual licence to publish, store, edit for length and clarity, quote and archive it on rationalsurvivor.com and in related material such as the newsletter, with attribution to the name you supplied. If you send us a correction we act on, we may cite you in the article's correction note; tell us if you would rather not be named.

We moderate. We remove comments that give dangerous instruction without qualification, that advocate illegal activity, that harass another reader, that are spam or affiliate-link drops, or that make medical claims we cannot let stand unchallenged next to our own content. Moderation is editorial judgement, not censorship of disagreement — a well-argued comment saying our test was flawed stays up, and often earns a reply.

Comments are readers' opinions, not ours. We do not verify reader-submitted claims before publication and do not endorse them.

5. Prohibited Uses

You agree not to use rationalsurvivor.com to do any of the following:

Scrape, crawl, mirror or bulk-download the site beyond ordinary reading, including harvesting our content for AI training corpora, aggregation sites or republication.
Republish our guides in full, or in substantially rewritten form that reproduces our structure, test data and conclusions, whether or not attribution is given.
Attempt to gain unauthorised access to the site, its hosting, its subscriber lists or any account, or probe it for vulnerabilities without our written consent.
Interfere with the site's operation — denial-of-service traffic, automated request floods, injecting scripts, or uploading anything containing malware.
Post or transmit content that is unlawful, defamatory, threatening, discriminatory, or that harasses our writers or other readers.
Misrepresent your relationship with us: impersonating a Rational Survivor writer, claiming a partnership, endorsement or certification we have not given, or implying we have reviewed or approved a product when we have not.
Use our content to promote conduct that is illegal where you are, including breaches of firearm, knife, wildlife, foraging, burning and land-access law, which vary widely by jurisdiction.
Use our material as the basis of commercial training, a paid course or a client deliverable without a written licence from us.

We may suspend or block access to the site, without notice, for any breach of this section.

6. Third-Party Links, Sources and Affiliate Links

We link out constantly, because "here is where that figure comes from" is central to how we write. Those links fall into three categories, and your rights differ across them.

Source and reference links to public agencies, standards bodies and published research — for example Ready.gov, FEMA, the CDC or the EPA. We link to them because they are checkable. We do not control them, and their guidance changes; the version you read may differ from the version we cited.
Links to manufacturers, retailers, forums and other publications, provided for context. A link is not an endorsement of the linked party, its products, its claims or its own terms and privacy practices.
Affiliate links, from which we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. How that works, and how it is kept separate from our editorial judgement, is set out in full on the Affiliate Disclosure page. In short: commission never buys a recommendation, and we do not accept payment for a positive review.

Once you follow an outbound link, these terms stop applying and the destination site's terms take over. Prices, stock, specifications and safety recalls on retailer and manufacturer pages are theirs to maintain, not ours. Check them before you buy.

7. Disclaimer of Warranties

The site and everything on it are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement, to the fullest extent permitted by law.

Being specific about what that means for a preparedness publication:

We do not warrant that a technique, dosage, quantity, ratio or piece of gear described here will perform in your conditions. Our test results describe what happened in the conditions we recorded — temperature, altitude, water source, duration, load — and those conditions are part of the finding, not decoration around it.
We do not warrant that our content reflects the current version of any agency guideline, resuscitation protocol, water-treatment standard or food-safety rule. Guidance is revised. We update pages when we learn of a change, but the authoritative source is always the issuing body, not us.
We do not warrant that the site will be available, uninterrupted, timely, secure or free of errors, or that any file you download is free of harmful components.
Nothing here is medical, legal, financial, engineering or professional advice, and reading it creates no professional relationship of any kind. For a medical emergency, contact your local emergency number.

Where your local law does not allow the exclusion of certain warranties, those exclusions do not apply to you, and the remaining terms still stand.

8. Assumption of Risk and Limitation of Liability

Preparedness and outdoor skills carry genuine physical risk. Fire, sharp tools, cold water, altitude, stored fuel, generators, ladders, firearms, wild food, home-canned food and backcountry travel can injure or kill people who are competent, and more readily those who are not. You decide what to attempt, at what level of training, in what weather, with whom, and with what margin for error. That decision and its consequences are yours. Practise within your ability, get hands-on instruction for anything medical or technical, and read our full Disclaimer before acting on anything here.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Rational Survivor, its writers, editors, contributors and contractors are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, or for any loss of profit, data, property, health or opportunity, arising out of or connected with your use of rationalsurvivor.com, your reliance on its content, any purchase made through a link on it, or any unavailability of the site — whether the claim is framed in contract, negligence or otherwise, and whether or not we were advised such damages were possible.

Where liability cannot lawfully be excluded, our total aggregate liability to you for all claims is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us for access to the content in question (for free content, that is zero) or the minimum sum permitted by applicable law.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited under the law that applies to you.

9. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Rational Survivor, its writers, editors and contributors against any claim, demand, loss, liability, reasonable legal cost or expense arising from:

Your breach of these Terms of Use or any law or regulation.
Your use of the site or its content, including any republication, teaching, resale or redistribution of our material.
Anything you submit to us, including comments, photographs and reader test reports, and any claim that it infringes a third party's rights.
Your infringement of the intellectual property or other rights of any third party through your use of the site.

We will notify you of any such claim and may, at our own expense, take over its defence, in which case you agree to cooperate with us.

10. Availability, Changes and Termination of Access

We publish, revise and retire content continuously. Guides are updated when a test is repeated, when a product changes specification, or when the underlying agency guidance is revised; older versions are not kept publicly available. Corrections are noted in the article, in line with our Editorial Standards. Because content changes, do not treat a cached copy or a printout as current — check the page's update date before you rely on it for planning.

We may modify, suspend, move or discontinue any part of rationalsurvivor.com, including the newsletter and comments, at any time and without notice or liability. We may also terminate or restrict your access to the site, and remove your submissions, if you breach these terms or if we reasonably believe your use harms the site or its readers.

11. Governing Law and Disputes

These Terms of Use are governed by the laws applicable at the place where Rational Survivor is established, without regard to conflict-of-law principles, and any dispute arising from them or from your use of the site is subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of that place. If you are a consumer, this does not remove the protections of the mandatory consumer law of your country of residence, or your right to bring proceedings there where local law grants it.

Before starting any formal proceedings, we ask that you write to hello@rationalsurvivors.com and set out the issue. Most disagreements about our content — an error, a disputed test result, a permissions question — are resolved faster by email than by lawyers, and a substantiated correction is published rather than argued over.

If any provision of these terms is found unenforceable, it is severed and the remaining provisions continue in force. Our failure to enforce a term on one occasion is not a waiver of it. You may not assign your rights under these terms; we may assign ours if the site changes ownership.

12. Changes to These Terms

We may revise these Terms of Use to reflect changes in the law, in how the site works, or in what we publish. The revised terms take effect when posted on this page, and the "last updated" date above changes with them.

For material changes — for example a change to the content licence in section 2, or to comment rights in section 4 — we will flag the revision on the page for at least 30 days and, where the change affects subscribers, note it in the newsletter. Continuing to use rationalsurvivor.com after a revision means you accept the revised terms. If you do not, stop using the site and, if you wish, ask us to remove your submissions.

13. Contact

Questions about these terms, permission requests, copyright complaints and corrections all go to the same place:

Email: hello@rationalsurvivors.com
Contact form: the contact page
Privacy and data requests: privacy@rationalsurvivors.com, as described in the Privacy Policy

When you write about a specific page, include the URL and, if you are reporting an error, the measurement or claim you are disputing and what you observed instead. That is the fastest route to a correction, and corrections are how this site stays worth reading.