The terms of service of a website vary from the stupid to the sensible, from short to very lengthy. The Facebook terms, for instance, have been re-worked in an attempt to be plain English and are very wordy indeed -- but not stupid. No, stupid is a website with terms saying "This file may not be downloaded from this site." Imagining (if you have any technical knowledge at all) how someone can come up with that is likely to leave you with a sprained hindbrain. Not recommended.

Now, it's sensible to read the terms of use of a website; but not necessarily mandatory. Often there's a checkbox saying "yes, I have read the Terms and Conditions" (with a link to the T&C). You can still check that without actually having read the legalese. Perhaps a setup where you must click on three randomly chosen highlighted terms in the T&C text before you can continue would improve matters? In any case, you don't necessarily have to read the T&C, so have you really accepted them? Ars Technica reports on a recent court decision that says that the terms are enforceable even if you haven't read them. There's some limitations there, on the reasonableness of the terms and I imagine that a lot depends on how the T&Cs are used. Via Ars you can end up at two different reports at TechDirt, one for enforceable and one for non-enforceable. In other words, the jury (ha!) is still out on this one, but it's worth keeping in mind when designing a site with a click-through agreement.

The FSFE sites have no user agreement (this is something we should fix, actually, since we both provide a service and publish user content). KDE's UserBase has Guidelines and a code of conduct, which don't cover all the bases, but it's a start. Gitorious has something that looks a lot more like traditional terms of service -- one might argue at some point whether not-reading those terms allows one to escape from the choice of venue, in light of the two court decisions listed above.