Terms of Service

1. What these terms cover

These terms are an agreement between you and KingPin, an individual developer in New York, USA, who operates this website. They apply when you browse garrul.com or post in the demo comment section on the homepage. Using either means you're fine with what's on this page; if you're not, that's OK — please just don't use them.

They do not govern the Garrul software itself, and they do not apply to other people's websites that happen to run Garrul. If you're commenting on someone's blog, their rules apply, not these.

2. The software and its licence

Garrul is open source under the Apache License 2.0. That licence — not this page — is what grants you the right to use, modify, and redistribute the code, and its terms win over anything here if the two ever disagree.

In practice, the Apache licence lets you do essentially anything: run it commercially, fork it, build a product on it. Keep the copyright notice and don't use the project's name to imply we endorse your version. Nothing in these terms takes any of that away.

3. Using the comment section

The comments at the bottom of the homepage are a live Garrul instance, there so you can kick the tyres. Feel free to say hello, ask a question, or report something broken.

You need to be at least 13 to post. Please don't use it to:

• post anything unlawful, or content that infringes someone else's copyright or trademark;
• harass, threaten, or abuse anyone, or post hate speech;
• share other people's private information;
• post spam, SEO link-dumps, scams, or advertising;
• upload or link to malware, or try to exploit, overload, or break into the service;
• impersonate someone else, including us;
• evade a ban or a rate limit.

Automated access is fine within reason — the API is public and the RSS feeds exist to be read. Just don't hammer it hard enough to cost us money or degrade it for other people.

Found a security hole? Please report it rather than exercising it, and we'll fix it and credit you. Testing that stays inside your own Garrul deployment is always welcome; testing against ours without asking is not.

4. Your comments stay yours

You keep ownership of everything you write. We're not claiming your words.

By posting, you give us permission to store, display, and distribute your comment on this site and through the features attached to it — RSS feeds, the public API, and notification emails to people subscribed to that thread. That permission lasts as long as the comment is up, and it exists purely so the comment section can function. If you delete your comment, or ask us to, that ends.

You also confirm the comment is yours to post — that you wrote it, or otherwise have the right to share it.

Comments are public and indexable by search engines. Nothing you post there is private.

5. Moderation

We can edit, hide, or delete comments, and block accounts or IP ranges, when something breaks the rules above or is simply abusive. We'd rather explain than swing the hammer, so for anything borderline you'll usually get a reply first.

Some comments get held for review automatically by the spam filters. That isn't a judgement about you — it's a filter being cautious, and flagged comments go into a queue for a human rather than being silently dropped. If yours is stuck, ping us.

We're not obliged to host anyone's comment, and choosing to moderate some things doesn't commit us to catching everything.

6. Availability, or the lack of it

This site and its demo are free, run on a hobby budget, and come with no uptime promise. We may change how the demo works, wipe its comments, or take it down entirely — it's a demo, not a hosting service, and it isn't somewhere to keep anything you'd miss.

If you want comments you control, that's the entire point of the project: deploy your own.

7. Warranties and liability

Here's the part that has to sound like a contract. It's the standard open-source position, and it's the same disclaimer that's in the Apache licence.

The website, the demo, and the software are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, or non-infringement. We don't promise the software is free of bugs or that the site will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free.

To the maximum extent the law allows, we won't be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost profits, or lost revenue, arising from your use of the site, the demo, or the software. Where liability can't be excluded, it's capped at US $100 in total.

Some places don't allow certain exclusions, so if you live somewhere that gives you rights this section can't limit, you keep them.

8. If you deploy Garrul

Once Garrul is running in your Cloudflare account, it's your service. That means:

• Your infrastructure bill is yours. Cloudflare's pricing is between you and Cloudflare. The cost figures on this site are estimates in good faith, not a quote.
• Your users' data is your responsibility. You're the data controller — publish your own privacy notice and honour deletion requests. See the note in our privacy policy.
• Your moderation is yours. You decide what's allowed on your site, and you're responsible for what you host.
• Keep it updated. Security fixes land in the repository; applying them is on you.

We're happy to help via GitHub issues, but we can't access your instance, recover your data, or be on call for it.

9. Governing law and changes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and any dispute goes to the state or federal courts located in New York. If you're a consumer elsewhere, this doesn't strip you of protections your local law gives you.

If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.

We may update this page — the date at the top tells you when we last did. Changes apply going forward, and for anything significant we'll mention it in the comment section rather than quietly rewriting the text. If you ever want to know what an earlier version of this page said, ask and we'll tell you.

10. Contact

Anything to raise, including a complaint about moderation: [email protected]. Bugs and feature requests belong on GitHub.

See also: Privacy Policy.