Acceptable Use Policy

The short version

Read it, print it, use it for your own property, send it to your neighbour. Do not scrape it, resell it, or pass it off as yours.

What you may do

• Read anything on this site
• Download, print and keep any guide, checklist or city sheet
• Send a page or a PDF to a neighbour, a client or your contractor
• Quote a figure, with attribution and a link to the page it came from
• Use what you learn here to make decisions about your own property

Real estate agents: you may share our guides with your clients and link to our pages from your listings. That is what they are for.

What you may not do

With the content:

• Resell any guide, checklist or sheet
• Republish our pages or PDFs on another site
• Remove our name, branding or source citations
• Present our work as yours, or as your firm's

With the rule data:

• Bulk-download, scrape or crawl it
• Extract it into another database, product or app
• Use it to build or train a competing dataset
• Use automated tools to harvest it at scale

The individual ordinances are public. Our compilation of them is not — the selection, the arrangement, the annotation and the verification dates are ours, and they are the part that took the work. See the Copyright Policy.

With the forms and the site:

• Submit information you are not entitled to share
• Submit a false address or impersonate a property owner
• Submit anything unlawful, infringing, defamatory, harassing or threatening
• Upload malware, or link to phishing
• Probe, scan, overload or disrupt the site
• Misrepresent who you are or what you want

With a referral:

• If you are a contractor, do not use our referrals outside what the Contractor Partner Terms permit
• Do not pass a referred owner's details to anyone else
• Do not use this site to generate leads for a business that is not in our network

The thing worth saying twice

Nothing on this site is engineering, legal or permitting advice.

The rule data is a compiled reference. We publish each figure with its code section and the date we checked it, and we do not publish one we have not verified — but codes change, cities interpret their own codes, and a summary is not the ordinance.

Confirm with your building department before you rely on anything here, and before you sign a contract or file a permit application.

The Shore Score is a screening from public data and your own answers. Nobody visits the property to produce it. It cannot tell you whether your structure is safe. Only a licensed contractor or engineer who inspects it can.

If we have something wrong, tell us at hello@walldockdeck.com. We will check it, and correct it, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it wrong.

Licensed work

We do not perform, broker or supervise licensed construction work. Marine construction, seawall work and dock building in Florida require a licensed contractor, and permits require a licensed contractor or the owner acting under an owner-builder exemption.

Do not use this site, our name, or anything we publish to suggest that work is permitted, approved or compliant. We do not approve anything. Your city does.

How we enforce this

We would rather have a conversation than block someone, and a first problem normally gets a note asking you to stop.

For serious or repeated breaches — scraping, republishing, impersonation, misusing referred owners' details — we may block access, remove a contractor from the network, pursue the breach, and report it where the law requires.

Report a problem

Something being misused, republished, or someone using our name who should not be? Email hello@walldockdeck.com with a link and what you saw. We look at every report.