Terms of Service

Last updated: June 25, 2024

From everyone at Octocon, thank you for using our platform! We've put together these Terms of Service to outline the rules and regulations for your use of all aspects of the Octocon platform.

When we say "Team," “we”, “our”, or “us” in this document, we are referring to the Octocon development team.

When we say “Services”, we mean our websites, including https://octocon.app and https://api.octocon.app, and any product created and maintained by our team. That includes the Octocon app and the Octocon Discord bot, whether delivered within a web browser, desktop application, mobile application, or another format.

When we say “You” or “your”, we are referring to the people or organizations that own an account with one or more of our Services.

When we say "our jurisdiction," we are referring to Massachusetts, United States.

We may update these Terms of Service ("Terms") in the future. Whenever we make a significant change to our policies, we will refresh the date at the top of this page and take any other appropriate steps to notify account holders.

When you use our Services, now or in the future, you are agreeing to the latest Terms. There may be times where we do not exercise or enforce a right or provision of the Terms; however, that does not mean we are waiving that right or provision. These Terms do contain a limitation of our liability.

If you violate any of the Terms, we may terminate your account. That’s a broad statement, and it means you need to place a lot of trust in us. We do our best to deserve that trust by being keeping an open door to your feedback.

1. Account Terms

  1. You are responsible for maintaining the security of your account and its affiliated login methods (including Google and Discord) and for ensuring that any of your users do the same. The Team cannot and will not be liable for any loss or damage from your failure to comply with this security obligation.
  2. You may not use the Services for any purpose outlined in Section 2.
  3. You are responsible for all content posted to and activity that occurs under your account.
  4. You must be a human. Accounts registered by “bots” or other automated methods are not permitted.

2. Prohibited Uses

  1. You may not use the Services for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. You must not, in the use of the Services, violate any laws in your and our jurisdiction.
  2. You may not use the Services to post or harbor any content that is:
    • Discriminatory, hateful, or violent
    • Invasive of another's privacy
    • Sexually explicit
    • Harmful to minors
    • Infringing on another's intellectual property
    • Spam, phishing, or malware
  3. You may not use the Services to:
    • Attempt to gain unauthorized access to the Services or another user's account
    • Use the Services in any manner that could interfere with, disrupt, negatively affect, or inhibit other users from fully enjoying the Services or that could damage, disable, overburden, or impair the functioning of the Services
  4. If you utilize our platform's "friend" features, you may not:
    • Expose (or "doxx") any other user's information of any kind without their explicit consent
    • Harass, bully, or otherwise harm another user
    • Share screenshots or other content (whether verbatim or paraphrased) relating to another user's account without their explicit consent

3. Cancellation and Termination

  1. You are solely responsible for properly canceling your account. Within each of our Services, we provide a simple no-questions-asked ability to cancel and permanently delete your account.An email or phone request to cancel your account is not automatically considered cancellation. If you need help canceling your account, you can always contact our team.
  2. All of your content will be inaccessible from the Services immediately upon account cancellation. Within 30 days, all content will be permanently deleted from active systems and logs. Within 60 days, all content will be permanently deleted from our backups. We cannot recover this information once it has been permanently deleted.
  3. We have the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of our Services for any reason at any time. Suspension means you and any other users on your account will not be able to access the account or any content in the account. Termination will furthermore result in the deletion of your account or your access to your account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment of all content in your account. We also reserve the right to refuse the use of the Services to anyone for any reason at any time. We have this clause because statistically speaking, out of the many accounts across our Services, there is at least one doing something nefarious. There are some things we staunchly stand against and this clause is how we exercise that stance.
  4. Verbal, physical, written or other abuse (including threats of abuse or retribution) of a Team employee will result in immediate account termination.

5. Modifications to the Service and Prices

  1. We make a promise to our users to support our Services as indefinitely as is feasible. That means when it comes to security, privacy, and user support, we will continue to maintain any legacy Services.
  2. We reserve the right at any time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, any part of our Services with or without notice.

6. Uptime, Security, and Privacy

  1. Your use of the Services is at your sole risk. We provide these Services on an “as is” and “as available” basis. We do not offer service-level agreements for most of our Services, but we do take uptime of our applications seriously. Visit https://status.octocon.app to see the status of our Services.
  2. We reserve the right to temporarily disable your account if your usage significantly exceeds the average usage of other users of the Services. Of course, we’ll reach out to the account owner before taking any action except in rare cases where the level of use may negatively impact the performance of the Service for other users.
  3. We take many measures to protect and secure your data through backups, redundancies, and encryption. We enforce encryption for data transmission from the public Internet.
  4. When you use our Services, you entrust us with your data. We take that trust to heart. You agree that the Team and its Services may process your data as described in our Privacy Policy and for no other purpose. We as humans can access your data for the following reasons:
    • To help you with support requests you make. We’ll ask for express consent before accessing your account.
    • On the rare occasions when an error occurs that stops an automated process partway through. We get automated alerts when such errors occur. When we can fix the issue and restart automated processing without looking at any personal data, we do. In rare cases, we have to look at a minimum amount of personal data to fix the issue. In these rare cases, we aim to fix the root cause to prevent the errors from recurring.
    • To safeguard the Team. We’ll look at logs and metadata as part of our work to ensure the security of your data and the Services as a whole.
    • To the extent required by applicable law. As a US-based team with most of our data infrastructure located in the US, we only preserve or share user data if compelled by a US government authority with a legally binding order or proper request under the Stored Communications Act, or in limited circumstances in the event of an emergency request. If a non-US authority approaches the Team for assistance, our default stance is to refuse unless the order has been approved by the US government, which compels us to comply through procedures outlined in an established mutual legal assistance treaty or agreement mechanism. If the Team is audited by a tax authority, we only share the bare minimum billing information needed to complete the audit.
  5. We use third party vendors and hosting partners to provide the necessary hardware, software, networking, storage, and related technology required to run the Services. Only vendors listed explicitly under our Privacy Policy may have very limited access to your personal data.
  6. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act (“CCPA”), the Team is a “service provider”, not a “business” or “third party”, with respect to your use of the Services. That means we process any data you share with us only for the purpose you signed up for and as described in these Terms and the Privacy Policy. We do not retain, use, disclose, or sell any of that information for any commercial purposes. And on the flip-side, you agree to comply with your requirements under the CCPA and not use our Services in a way that violates the regulations.

7. Copyright and Content Ownership

  1. All content posted on the Services must comply with US copyright law.
  2. You give us a limited license to use the content posted by you and your users in order to provide the Services to you, but we claim no ownership rights over those materials. All materials you submit to the Services remain yours.
  3. We do not pre-screen content, but we reserve the right (but not the obligation) in our sole discretion to refuse or remove any content that is available via the Service.
  4. The Team or its licensors own all right, title, and interest in and to the Services, including all intellectual property rights therein, and you obtain no ownership rights in the Services as a result of your use. You may not duplicate, copy, or reuse any portion of the code or visual design elements without express written permission from the Team, or as made feasible through an open-source license. You must request permission to use the Team’s logos or any Service logos for promotional purposes. Please email us requests to use logos. We reserve the right to rescind any permissions if you violate these Terms.
  5. You agree not to reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, resell or exploit any portion of the Services, use of the Services, or access to the Services without the express written permission of the Team.

8. Features and Bugs

We design our Services with care, based on our own experience and the experiences of users who share their time and feedback. However, there is no such thing as a service that pleases everybody. We make no guarantees that our Services will meet your specific requirements or expectations.

We also test all of our features extensively before shipping them. As with any software, our Services inevitably have some bugs. We track the bugs reported to us and work through priority ones, especially any related to security or privacy. Not all reported bugs will get fixed and we don’t guarantee completely error-free Services.

9. Services Adaptations and API Terms

We offer Application Program Interfaces (“API”s) for our Services. Any use of the API, including through a third-party product that accesses the Services, is bound by these Terms plus the following specific terms:

  1. You expressly understand and agree that we are not liable for any damages or losses resulting from your use of the API or third-party products that access data via the API.
  2. Abuse or excessively frequent requests to the Services via the API may result in the temporary or permanent suspension of your account’s access to the API. The Team, in its sole discretion, will determine abuse or excessive usage of the API. If we need to suspend your account’s access, we will attempt to warn the account owner first. If your API usage could or has caused downtime, we may cut off access without prior notice.

10. Liability

We mention liability throughout these Terms but to put it all in one section:

You expressly understand and agree that the Team shall not be liable, in law or in equity, to you or to any third party for any direct, indirect, incidental, lost profits, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, including, but not limited to, damages for loss of profits, goodwill, use, data or other intangible losses (even if the Team has been advised of the possibility of such damages), resulting from: (i) the use or the inability to use the Services; (ii) the cost of procurement of substitute goods and services resulting from any goods, data, information or services purchased or obtained or messages received or transactions entered into through or from the Services; (iii) unauthorized access to or alteration of your transmissions or data; (iv) statements or conduct of any third party on the service; (v) or any other matter relating to these Terms or the Services, whether as a breach of contract, tort (including negligence whether active or passive), or any other theory of liability.

In other words: choosing to use our Services does mean you are making a bet on us. If the bet does not work out, that’s on you, not us. We do our darnedest to be as safe a bet as possible through careful management of the platform; investments in security, infrastructure, and talent. If you choose to use our Services, thank you for betting on us.

If you have a question about any of these Terms, please contact our Support team. We're happy to help.

Adapted from the Basecamp open-source policies / CC BY 4.0