Terms of Service

1. Acceptance

By creating an account you agree to these Terms and to the Privacy Policy. Both are accepted together, once, at signup, and the acceptance is timestamped on your account. If these Terms change materially, the version string above changes, and accounts that accepted an older version are not automatically treated as having accepted the new one.

2. Minimum age

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account. This is a single global threshold rather than a per-country one: GDPR Art. 8 sets the digital-consent age between 13 and 16 depending on EU member state, and 16 both satisfies the strictest member state and clears the US COPPA threshold of 13 outright, without needing to detect where you are. This is declared by a checkbox at signup, not verified, and no date of birth is collected: see the Privacy Policy §9 for why.

3. Account responsibilities

You are responsible for the account you create: keeping your credentials to yourself, and for activity that happens through your account. Google sign-in is optional; using it does not create a separate set of obligations from registering directly.

4. Display names

Your display name is public: it appears on leaderboards, on every game you play, and in replays. Names are subject to the moderation policy actually enforced by this codebase: ASCII characters only, no impersonation of another player or of staff, and no reserved or blocked terms. Names can be changed by you, subject to a cooldown, or by a moderator when a name violates policy.

5. Fair play

The following are prohibited and are the specific things this codebase’s cheat-detection signals are built to surface:

• Engine assistance : using chess engine analysis, in real time or otherwise, to choose your moves.
• Sandbagging: deliberately losing rating or manipulating results to obtain an easier matchmaking pool.
• Deliberate disconnection : intentionally dropping your connection or otherwise abandoning a game to manipulate its outcome or the opponent’s clock.

6. Moderation and sanctions

Reports and moderator actions are handled under the moderation system described in the Privacy Policy. A sanction (warning, ban from rated play, or full account ban) is recorded permanently against your account, including its reason. Sanctions survive account deletion: because deletion anonymises rather than deletes your account row, a sanction record is retained against the anonymised row precisely so that deleting your account and registering again cannot be used to launder a ban. Registering an entirely new account under a different email is not prevented by this.

7. The service is free, non-commercial, and provided as is

KiriChess is a free, non-commercial, independently run project. It is provided as is, without any warranty of any kind, and with no guaranteed uptime. Because the project is pre-launch and under active development, accounts, games and rating history may be lost or reset without notice while it remains in this state.

8. Termination

You may stop using the service, or delete your account, at any time (see Privacy Policy §6 for exactly what deletion does). We may suspend or terminate an account for violating these Terms, at our discretion, through the moderation and sanctions process described above.

9. Governing law

[TO BE COMPLETED]

10. Changes to these Terms

These Terms are versioned by the “Last updated” / “Version” date at the top, matching the Privacy Policy’s versioning and the version recorded on your account.