Terms of Service

1. What this is

Comic Chat Web ("the service") is a free, unofficial, open-source demonstration project operated by an individual. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft. The source is published under the AGPL-3.0 and is available on GitHub. If this deployment runs a modified version, the AGPL obliges its operator to offer that modified source to you, and to replace this link with one that reaches it. By connecting to a room you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not connect.

2. Eligibility

You must be at least 18 years old to use the service. It is not directed at children, and no part of it is designed to collect information from them. If you believe someone under 18 has used the service, contact us and we will remove what we can identify.

3. Acceptable use

You agree not to use the service to:

• post anything unlawful, or anything that sexualizes or endangers a minor;
• harass, threaten, stalk, defame, or incite violence against anyone;
• impersonate another person in a way intended to deceive, including by nickname;
• post spam, advertising, malware, or links intended to defraud anyone;
• flood, script, scrape, load-test, or otherwise use automated means to access the service, or attempt to circumvent its rate limits, filters, mutes, or room limits;
• attempt to gain unauthorized access to the service or to any other user's session.

4. Moderation is best effort

Messages and nicknames pass through an automated word filter. Blocked messages trigger an escalating temporary mute, and repeated blocks disconnect the connection. This is a crude, automatic mechanism. It will miss things and it will occasionally catch harmless text. Nothing here is a promise that the service is a safe, moderated, or sanitized environment, and no human reviews messages in real time.

Content in rooms is created by users, not by us. We do not endorse it and we are not responsible for it. If you are shown something unlawful, please report it using the contact below, and we will remove what we can and report it to the authorities where the law requires.

5. We can disconnect you

We may mute, disconnect, block, or otherwise restrict any connection, and may remove any content, close any room, or shut the service down entirely, at any time, for any reason or no reason, with or without notice. Because there are no accounts, these measures are necessarily approximate, and we make no promise that any given restriction will be effective or that any given user can be kept out.

6. Your content

You keep whatever rights you already have in what you type. You are responsible for it. By sending it you give us permission to transmit, display, and store it as needed to operate the service, in the way described in the Privacy Policy below. Do not send anything you do not have the right to send.

7. No warranty

The service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be available, uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error free, that messages will be delivered or retained, or that any defect will be corrected. This is a hobby demo. It may break, lose your messages, or disappear without notice.

8. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for any loss of data, profits, goodwill, or reputation, arising out of or relating to your use of the service, whether in contract, tort, or otherwise, even if advised of the possibility. To the extent any liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the greater of the amount you paid to use the service, which is zero, or ten US dollars. Some jurisdictions do not allow certain exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

9. Changes

These terms may change. The date at the top of this page marks the current version, and continuing to use the service after a change means you accept it.

10. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Alberta, Canada, without regard to conflict of law rules, and the courts located there have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute, except where mandatory local consumer law gives you the right to bring a claim where you live.

11. The rest

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force and that part is narrowed only as far as needed to fix it. Not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it later. These terms and the Privacy Policy below are the whole agreement between us about the service.

Privacy Policy

What the rooms hold

Rooms are public and unencrypted at rest. Everyone connected to a room sees every message in it, and anyone who joins later receives the recent history. There is no private messaging and no end to end encryption. Your connection to the server is encrypted in transit over HTTPS and WSS.

When you send a message, the room stores:

That random identifier is created in your browser, is not derived from anything about you or your device, and is not linked to any account, because there are none. Clearing your browser storage discards it and a new one is generated.

How long it is kept

Each room keeps a rolling window of its most recent 100 events. Older events are deleted automatically as new ones arrive. Nothing is archived or backed up by us beyond that window. Bear in mind that anyone in the room can screenshot or copy what they see, and we cannot undo that.

What we do not collect

No accounts, no email addresses, no passwords. We set no cookies, no advertising, and no third-party trackers. We keep no request logs of our own: the platform can record the IP address behind each connection, and we have that recording turned off, so no copy of it reaches us. We do have it count requests per IP address to block floods, which happens on its systems and never reaches us. What our hosting provider keeps for its own purposes is described below, and we remain accountable for what it handles on our behalf.

Traffic measurement

This deployment runs Cloudflare Web Analytics, which loads a small script from Cloudflare on each page. It measures page views and load timings, and records the country, referring link, path, browser, operating system, and device type of a visit. The room you join is part of the URL, so the recorded path can name it. Your nickname, your messages, and the random identifier above are no part of this and are never sent to it. The script is not served to visitors in the European Union, so nothing is measured for them. This data is governed by Cloudflare's privacy policy.

What our hosting provider sees

The service runs on Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects. As the network and hosting provider, Cloudflare processes connection metadata including IP addresses in order to route traffic, protect against abuse, and apply rate limits, and it retains operational request logs. That processing is governed by Cloudflare's privacy policy. Room data lives in Durable Object storage on Cloudflare's infrastructure, which spans multiple countries. Your messages may therefore be stored and processed in a country other than your own or the operator's, and be subject to the laws of the country holding them.

When we may disclose

We do not sell room data and there is no third party we hand it to. We may disclose what we hold where a law, court order, or lawful request from an authority requires it, where we are obliged to report unlawful content, or where we believe in good faith that it is necessary to prevent serious harm to someone. In practice the rolling window above means there is usually little left for us to disclose, and a request to identify a sender is one only our hosting provider can answer.

What your browser stores locally

These stay on your device and are not sent to us except where noted above:

• your nickname and chosen character, only if you tick "Remember me";
• the random identifier described above, which is sent with your messages;
• display preferences such as the modern tweaks toggle, nametags, plain text view, and sidebar width.

Clearing site data in your browser removes all of it. Two short-lived entries in session storage carry your details between rooms when you switch, and the captured transcript to the report page, which deletes it as it loads. Session storage is discarded when the tab closes.

The Studio

The strip editor at /studio runs entirely in your browser. Strips are composed, rendered, and exported locally, and are never uploaded or stored by us. The one exception: while the word filter is enabled, balloon text is sent to the server to be checked against the filter and the result returned. That text is not logged or retained.

Your choices

Because the service has no accounts, we have no way to identify which messages are yours, so we cannot look them up or delete them on request. In practice they leave the room on their own once 100 newer events have arrived. If a specific message needs to come down sooner, tell us which room and roughly when, and we will remove what we can find.

Changes

This policy may change. The date at the top of this page marks the current version.

Contact

For reports of unlawful content, takedown requests, or privacy inquiries, including any request under applicable privacy law, contact hello@remsky.art. That reaches the person accountable for privacy here. For bugs and everything else, the GitHub issue tracker is the better place.

In a room, the Report control under "More…" captures the transcript you can see and opens the report page, which explains who can act on serious material and what we can and cannot do. The transcript is built in your browser and goes nowhere until you send it yourself.