Terms
These terms are the agreement between you and Chesslord. They say what you get, what you may and may not do with it, what we do and do not promise, and how either of us can end it. They are short because the service is free and there is little to agree to.
Who you are agreeing with, and how
This agreement is between you and Chesslord. Where these terms say “we” or “us”, that is who is meant.
You accept them by using the site. If you do not accept them, do not use it: no part of the service is available on other terms.
If you are using the site for an organisation rather than for yourself, you are telling us you may accept these terms on its behalf.
The service, and that it is free
Chesslord is a service for studying chess. What it offers changes as the product changes, and these terms cover the service as it is at the time you use it rather than a list of features fixed on the day they were written.
An account is required to use any of it, and there is no anonymous mode.
It is free. Nothing is metered, there is no paid tier to move up to, and an account carries no payment of any kind. Nothing in these terms obliges you to pay us anything.
Free also means there is no service level. We do not undertake that the service will be reachable, and we do not undertake that it will still be here tomorrow.
Your account, and what you declare
The account is yours alone. Keep your sign-in details to yourself, and tell us if you think somebody else has them.
The site is for people aged sixteen and over. We do not verify that.
What you tell us has to be true. In particular, when you declare an account you hold on another service, you are telling us that the games published under it are yours to have read. We do not check it, which is precisely why the declaration is yours to make.
You can delete your account yourself, from your settings, at any time and without asking us.
Your content, and the licence you give us
What you upload and what you save stays yours. We claim no ownership of it.
What you give us is a limited licence: to hold it and process it for the single purpose of providing the service to you. It is not a licence to publish it, to show it to anybody else, to sell it, or to use it to train anything.
The licence lasts as long as we hold the content, and ends when the content goes, whether because you deleted it or because you deleted your account.
Nothing here publishes anything on your behalf. The only exception is one you make yourself.
Upload only what you are entitled to upload. If you upload something you have no right to, that is a matter between you and whoever holds the right, and we may take it down and close the account.
How you may use it
Use it for yourself, and leave it usable for everybody else.
Do not use the service to cheat. Nothing here may be used to get a move, an evaluation or an analysis for a game you are playing somewhere else, on any site, in any club or at any board. Doing it breaks the rules of every one of those places, and it breaks these terms as well.
Do not try to reach another person’s account. Do not hammer the service with machine-driven traffic. Do not send traffic whose purpose is to make it unavailable to somebody else. Do not work around the limits we set, and do not resell access to the service.
An account that does any of that can be closed without notice. That is the whole of the enforcement, because there is nothing else to take away.
Ending it, from either side
You can end this agreement whenever you like, by deleting your account. Everything held under it goes with it, at once.
We can close an account that breaches these terms, and we can do it without notice where the breach is doing harm to the service or to somebody else. Where notice is possible, we give it.
Closing an account means deleting it, and that cannot be undone. There is no suspended state to come back from and nothing kept aside to reinstate, so a decision you want to argue with has to be argued with before it is carried out, not after.
We can also stop offering the service, in whole or in part. Since it is free and runs for no fixed term, we may do that at any time; where we can give warning first, we will.
What is not promised
Nothing the service works out is certain. A result that comes back wrong is a normal outcome rather than a fault: what you get is an assessment, not a verdict, and it can be wrong in ways that look convincing.
The service is provided as it is. We give no warranty, express or implied, that it will be available, uninterrupted, free of error, or fit for any purpose you have in mind.
Do not lean on it where something turns on the answer: not for a title, not for a dispute, not for a decision with money on it.
What we are liable for
We are liable for the damage we cause you, on the ordinary terms the law sets. Nothing here limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not permit us to exclude.
What we do exclude, as far as the law allows, is indirect and consequential loss: lost profit, lost opportunity, and loss that follows from a decision you took on the strength of something this service showed you.
Nothing in these terms takes away a right that consumer law in your own country gives you and does not allow to be signed away. Where a clause here conflicts with such a right, the right prevails and the rest of these terms stand.
Independence, and the software this runs on
Chesslord is independent. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to chess.com, Lichess, or the Stockfish project. Their names appear here to say what the service reads from and what it runs on, and for no other reason.
Games are read from the public interfaces chess.com and Lichess publish. Analysis is Stockfish, sent to your browser and run on your own machine.
The board is chessground, from the Lichess project, with its piece artwork recoloured for this site, so what reaches you is a modified copy. Under the GPL a modified copy stays under the GPL and has to be marked as modified, which this sentence does. Stockfish and chessground are both licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3, and both are conveyed to your browser when you use the site. Their own projects publish their source and their licence text at the addresses below; the recolouring is ours, and you can ask us for it.
Changes to the service and to these terms
We can change the service, and we can change these terms, because a free product that runs for years does not stay the same one.
When a change to these terms matters to you, meaning what you may do, what we are liable for or how it ends, we say so on the site before it takes effect. Carrying on using the site after that is how you accept the new version; if you would rather not, delete your account.
There is no version history to consult: what is written here is what applies today.